Like many other chess fans, I was consequently disturbed when I read, sometime in the early 90s, that the English Grandmaster and analyst John Nunn had for the first time subjected the games to computer analysis. He said he had expected maybe to discover a few trivial slips. Instead, he was shocked to find major errors in the analysis of almost every game. Variations which Alekhine had examined in great detail, and claimed to be winning, were in many cases nothing of the kind. There were games everyone knew, in which the conventional wisdom was that Alekhine's opponent had made a tiny mistake early on, and then been squeezed by the World Champion's iron logic, with no possible chance of escape. The emotionless computer, unimpressed by Alekhine's god-like reputation, showed ways in which the apparently inevitable flow of the game could have been interrupted, and Alekhine's opponent could have turned the tables. We had all been victims of an illusion created by excessive respect for someone who was, in fact, just human.
After Nunn's discovery, it was only going to be a matter of time before computers overtook people as the world's best chess players. I wonder whether similar things will eventually happen in other fields. For example, imagine a mechanical literary critic, say fifty to a hundred years from now. It surely wouldn't understand the text as deeply as a person can. But having instant access to the whole of world literature, in all known languages, might give it insights that no human would be able to match. A lot of the time, you'd find quantity winning out over quality.
Well, we will see...
]]>
author: Alexander Alekhine
name: Manny
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1939
rating: 4
read at: 1973/01/01
date added: 2025/04/27
shelves: games, the-tragedy-of-chess
review:
Alexander Alekhine was one of the all-time chess greats, and this collection covers the period when he was at his peak, dominating world chess. Almost every serious player of my generation read it several times. The games and commentary were close to being a sacred text.
Like many other chess fans, I was consequently disturbed when I read, sometime in the early 90s, that the English Grandmaster and analyst John Nunn had for the first time subjected the games to computer analysis. He said he had expected maybe to discover a few trivial slips. Instead, he was shocked to find major errors in the analysis of almost every game. Variations which Alekhine had examined in great detail, and claimed to be winning, were in many cases nothing of the kind. There were games everyone knew, in which the conventional wisdom was that Alekhine's opponent had made a tiny mistake early on, and then been squeezed by the World Champion's iron logic, with no possible chance of escape. The emotionless computer, unimpressed by Alekhine's god-like reputation, showed ways in which the apparently inevitable flow of the game could have been interrupted, and Alekhine's opponent could have turned the tables. We had all been victims of an illusion created by excessive respect for someone who was, in fact, just human.
After Nunn's discovery, it was only going to be a matter of time before computers overtook people as the world's best chess players. I wonder whether similar things will eventually happen in other fields. For example, imagine a mechanical literary critic, say fifty to a hundred years from now. It surely wouldn't understand the text as deeply as a person can. But having instant access to the whole of world literature, in all known languages, might give it insights that no human would be able to match. A lot of the time, you'd find quantity winning out over quality.
Well, we will see...
]]>
Pooh was getting rather tired of everyone ganging up on him, and he wondered if there was some way he could grab just a couple more votes. He suddenly thought of . Now if he inserted the picture here...
"Oh, help!" said Pooh, as a half-dozen angry comments appeared on his screen.
"If only I hadn't--" he said, as a dozen even more angry messages turned up in his inbox.
"You see, what I meant to do," he explained, as several people unliked his review, "what I meant to do--"
"Of course, it was rather--" he admitted, as they all simultaneously unfriended him.
"It all comes, I suppose," he decided, as the system administrators closed down his account, "it all comes of liking votes so much. Oh, help!"
"But who won?" asked Christopher Robin.
"Pooh did, of course!" I replied. "That silly old Heart of Darkness wasn't even in the story, so Pooh won by default."
"I thought so too," said Christopher Robin. "I just wanted to be sure."
]]>
author: A.A. Milne
name: Manny
average rating: 4.53
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 1968/01/01
date added: 2025/04/25
shelves: celebrity-death-match, children, parody-homage, the-goodreads-experience, well-i-think-its-funny, why-not-call-it-poetry
review:
For , Heart of Darkness (25) versus The Complete Tales and Poems of Winnie-the-Pooh (24)
Pooh was getting rather tired of everyone ganging up on him, and he wondered if there was some way he could grab just a couple more votes. He suddenly thought of . Now if he inserted the picture here...
"Oh, help!" said Pooh, as a half-dozen angry comments appeared on his screen.
"If only I hadn't--" he said, as a dozen even more angry messages turned up in his inbox.
"You see, what I meant to do," he explained, as several people unliked his review, "what I meant to do--"
"Of course, it was rather--" he admitted, as they all simultaneously unfriended him.
"It all comes, I suppose," he decided, as the system administrators closed down his account, "it all comes of liking votes so much. Oh, help!"
"But who won?" asked Christopher Robin.
"Pooh did, of course!" I replied. "That silly old Heart of Darkness wasn't even in the story, so Pooh won by default."
"I thought so too," said Christopher Robin. "I just wanted to be sure."
]]>
In Mixed Their Use and Abuse , Karen Sullivan employs findings from linguistics and cognitive science to explore how metaphors are combined and why they sometimes mix. Once we understand the ways that metaphoric ideas are put together, we can appreciate why metaphor combinations have such a wide range of effects.
Mixed Their Use and Abuse includes analyses of over a hundred metaphors from politicians, sportspeople, writers and other public figures, and identifies the characteristics that make these metaphors annoying, amusing or astounding.]]>
I don't know why I didn't start this years ago, but better late than never.
Current Affairs
Asked about the sanctions, Mr Putin said that the EU would not be able to manage without Russian gas. “They badly want to bite us, but their opportunities are limited,� he said. “If they try to punish us by putting us into a corner on our knees like naughty children, they will cut the branch they are sitting on.�
_____________________________
Without wishing to count any chickens before they are hatched, it looks pretty good. My colleague Winston McKenzie said that the Ukip fox is in the Westminster hen-house and it does feel a bit like that.
- Nigel Farage, May 23 2014
_____________________________
An elderly woman who was bitten by a police dog has died in hospital. Cleveland Police, which owns the German shepherd, has expressed its "sincerest condolences" and has referred the matter to the police watchdog.
- The Independent, July 22 2014
_____________________________
Tsipras and his bullish finance minister Yannis Varoufakis are engaged in a terrifying game of chicken with EU leaders.
- The Independent, July 4 2015
_____________________________
The performance of the EU politicians has been disgraceful. They’ve failed to face reality. These issues have been hanging around like weeping carbuncles and they’ve just papered over the cracks.
- The Independent, July 9 2015
_____________________________
It was widely assumed that Mr. Trump’s gift for affronting conventional political opinion would finally swamp his candidacy after he allowed Chris Matthews to hound him into a mousetrap about abortion.
- Conrad Black, April 7 2016
_____________________________
The Syrian conflict has acted like a greenhouse for extremist groups which are now spreading like a cancer, UN chief Ban Ki-moon said on Friday.
- thelocal.ch, April 10 2016
_____________________________
Hillary is a cauldron-tested globalist who had the spine to give Obama a thumbs-up for taking out Osama Bin Laden.
- Daily News (New York), April 13 2016
_____________________________
What Trump has said about Nato is music to the Kremlin’s ears. If that is what an American thinks of Nato, the bedrock about the transatlantic alliance, which Russia is always trying to divide and split and weaken, well, Trump is handing them a silver platter.
- Judy Dempsey, senior associate at Carnegie Europe, April 29 2016
_____________________________
How might Sanders walk the fine line he needs to—pushing hard for his ideal platform without poisoning the party well?
- Bill Scher, Politico, May 16 2016
_____________________________
Unfortunately for both him and the country, not enough people saw through his smoke screen and he won the poisoned chalice. In his Telegraph column of today, it seems he is reverting to the same undeliverable promise of a land of milk and honey.
- The Guardian, June 17 2016
_____________________________
Convention bounces often fade, and we’re still in a period when we’d expect Clinton’s numbers to be somewhat inflated by her convention. Our best bet: Wait a couple more weeks to see where the dust settles.
- fivethirtyeight.com, Aug 7 2016
_____________________________
"The first debate is pivotal for Clinton if she’s going to arrest this drip and recover,� said Geoffrey Skelley. “If she doesn’t, then this race stays on a knife’s edge."
- The Hill, Sep 15 2016
_____________________________
These mistakes pouring from the top of the ticket were “small potatoes�, Pence later insisted.
- The Guardian, Oct 5 2016
_____________________________
Gingrich: GOP bedwetters have 'egg on their face' after debate
- The Hill, Oct 10 2016
_____________________________
Mr Comey has rocket-fuelled a venomous contest just when Mr Trump was desperate for a lifeline.
- The Guardian, Oct 31 2016
_____________________________
We managed to unleash something; it was like throwing stones into a bees� nest. And now, it is one of the biggest screw-ups of all time.
- Donald Trump, Jan 15 2017
_____________________________
“What [Nunes] did was basically to go to the president, who’s being investigated by the FBI and others, and by the intelligence committee, to give them information,� Cummings told CNN. “Basically, what he has done is he has scuttled and put a cloud over his own investigation."
- CNN, Mar 23 2017
_____________________________
The dinosaur studios are facing heavy competition from upstarts such as DC Comics and Marvel, whose libraries are awash with tentpole blockbuster material.
- The Guardian, Mar 27 2017
_____________________________
Now the FBI is under a dark cloud. If the new director finds nothing on Russia, he will surely be suspected of a whitewash.
- The Guardian, May 10 2017
_____________________________
President Trump is besieged by internal leaks as he tries to weather the fallout from his firing of FBI director James Comey.
- The Hill, May 12 2017
_____________________________
A statement to parliament on Thursday that the UK has financial “obligations� from its EU membership helped defuse a potentially toxic row that was brewing.
- The Guardian, Jul 19 2017
_____________________________
An increasingly desperate Theresa May will try to shore up her flagging premiership with a raft of new policies.
- The Guardian, Oct 1 2017
_____________________________
The former FBI director has played his cards carefully since his appointment in May. He’s clearly turning over every rock to see what crawls out from underneath.
- The Daily 202, Oct 31 2017
_____________________________
The White House, now grappling with the fallout from the departure of a senior aide after spousal abuse allegations, may not have an easy time navigating a massive infrastructure plan through a polarized Congress.
- The Guardian, Feb 12 2018
_____________________________
The driving factor he frequently cites for the top-heavy market is that the Fed’s quantitative easing has inflated valuations to unsustainable levels, and as the free money goes away, the bottom will fall out, leaving a trail of blown-up investors.
- Market Watch, Apr 11 2018
_____________________________
A buttoned-up justice with somewhat opaque views on hot-button issues might be more palatable to Murkowski and Collins, Cornyn suggested.
- Politico, June 29 2018
_____________________________
Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns said she would �100%� submit a letter to the backbench 1922 committee to trigger a contest. “I’d put the letter in if these red lines were severely watered down and we had one foot in, one foot out,� she said.
- The Guardian, Jul 10 2018
_____________________________
But when Manafort’s “golden goose� client, the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, fell from power in 2014, the money dried up and Manafort’s web of deceit expanded to compensate.
- The Guardian, Aug 1 2018
_____________________________
Once a nominee is wounded, his or her confirmation hopes can quickly splinter as political support fractures, so Kavanaugh can ill afford any roadblocks.
- CNN, Sep 17 2018
_____________________________
Several sources have rubbished claims that the German chancellor Angela Merkel will ride to the rescue of the British by watering down the EU position.
- The Guardian, Oct 31 2018
_____________________________
But they decided it would likely be too tough of a haul with all the GOP members who have decided not to show up for the lame-duck session, and that the bill would just further bring them down a rabbit hole.
- Huffington post, Dec 18 2018
_____________________________
By any measure, Trump’s fixation with a wall has boxed him into a corner.
- The Guardian, Jan 6 2019
_____________________________
This political jam is the reason that the President now faces a crossroads that could fundamentally alter the character of his presidency and change the foundation of a political crusade that is based on scorched earth immigration rhetoric.
- CNN, Jan 28 2019
_____________________________
But this high-wire decision is unlikely to be pre-cooked.
- The Guardian, Mar 15 2019
_____________________________
He told Sky News the leak inquiry, overseen by cabinet secretary Sir Mark Sedwill, had been “a witch hunt from the start� and had taken place “in a kangaroo court".
- The Guardian, May 2 2019
_____________________________
Boris Johnson appears willing to drive Britain off this cliff come hell or high water.
- The Guardian, Aug 20 2019
_____________________________
At times, as his simmering fury bursts open in meetings or on Twitter, and as new political conflagrations take hold, it looks like Trump's presidency is unraveling.
- CNN, Oct 21 2019
_____________________________
In Norse mythology, a lot of the deities end up doing for each other, so there is vague precedent to Apple’s iPhone or whatever being Bezos’s achilles heel.
- The Guardian, Jan 24 2020
_____________________________
While a completely valid viewpoint, glass-half-empty investors will see the flip-side to this reasoning.
- CNN, Mar 18 2020
_____________________________
It’s a supply chain which has multiple dynamically shifting bottlenecks and the administration is trying to overcome them one at a time, as they pop up.
- The Guardian, Mar 25 2020
_____________________________
“If you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you’re gonna set yourself back,� Fauci said. “So as painful as it is to go by the careful guidelines of gradually phasing into a reopening, it’s going to backfire. That’s the problem.�
- The Guardian, Apr 21 2020
_____________________________
There is an enormous amount of ‘mopping up� to do to make sure that all potential transmission chains have been extinguished.
- The Guardian, Jun 17 2020
_____________________________
If the mud that is being thrown at the wall isn’t sticking in the same way as it did then, it is possible that the underhand tactics will backfire.
- The Guardian, Oct 24 2020
_____________________________
Trump’s stolen election lie lingers in America like a slow-burning infection, a political poison pill undermining the stability and security of the nation.
- medium.com, Jun 7 2021
_____________________________
He told reporters: "Be under no illusion, the prime minister has only done this U-turn because his back was against the wall."
- bbc.com. Nov 17 2021
_____________________________
In the age of social media and a 1,000mph news cycle, actions or images that are full of the worst kind of symbolism instantly balloon into huge, multifaceted stories that can sink even people used to impunity.
- The Guardian, Apr 11 2022
_____________________________
Raab said he did not believe there would be a vote of no confidence against Boris Johnson next week. He told Sky News: “I just don’t see that. I think the Westminster bubble and village whips this stuff up.
- The Guardian, Jun 1 2022
_____________________________
Speaking in Wakefield, Nandy said the government was rotten to the core and that the rot started at the top.
- The Guardian, Jun 1 2022
_____________________________
I understand that we need to rocket-booster growth, but you don’t do that by throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- Nadine Dorries, Oct 5 2022
_____________________________
Liz Truss’s dash for growth is already limping badly after she made a pig’s ear of presenting her ambitious mini-Budget and was forced into humiliating U-turns.
- Daily Mail, Oct 13 2022
_____________________________
“People have drawn the conclusion that the whole project of net zero needs to be delayed, mothballed, and put on ice,� Johnson said.
- The Guardian, Nov 8 2022
_____________________________
“I think it would be very wrong to tar the entire industry, by this one bad apple, which happened to be a very big apple,� said Tim Grant.
- The Guardian, Nov 15 2022
_____________________________
The ex-president is entering the race bogged down with legal baggage that could derail his campaign.
- The Guardian, Nov 16 2022
_____________________________
For Trump, who has long defied political gravity, the fallout remains uncertain.
- The Guardian, Dec 10 2022
_____________________________
Most Republicans think this helps Trump in the short run � and could even provide a glide path to the Republican nomination. This freezes the race at a time when Trump holds a huge lead in Republican polls. That’s likely to grow with the saturation coverage ahead.
Indictment-themed Republican fundraising texts and emails started instantly, with Trump as a martyr [and] with Trump taking up all that oxygen, it’ll be even harder for Florida Gov Ron DeSantis � or any Trump rival � to gain traction.
- The Guardian, Mar 31 2023
_____________________________
The “Florida blueprint� that is DeSantis’s vision for the future of the US is, they say, a culture-war Bible peppered with extremist policies
- The Guardian, May 25 2023
_____________________________
The Middle East is akin to a tinderbox, where even a small scratch can swiftly unravel the situation.
- Medium, Apr 23 2024
_____________________________
Can Anthony Albanese catch the dragon’s tail to defrost and reboot Australia-China relations?
- The Guardian, Nov 4 2023
_____________________________
As a piece of imagery, the glass ceiling got very old very quickly, so that even by the time Clinton had it on heavy rotation, it was already emptied of meaning.
- The Guardian, Sep 5 2024
_____________________________
Every time he comes out, he moves the goalposts. So that’s concerning, but we’re going to throw everything and the kitchen sink at this.
- The Guardian, Jan 12 2025
_____________________________
Trump is a lame duck and party elites will constantly be jockeying to be viewed as the heir apparent, and his den of vipers may just consume itself.
- The Guardian, Jan 18 2025
A foreign policy veteran in Washington told me that the state department was stuck in the past, unable to pivot and finesse its new role in the world, and compared its frozen nostalgia to “watching old cowboy movies on repeat�.
- The Guardian, Feb 10 2025
Taking the axe to government should be an informed choice. With Trump’s America currently disembowelling itself, at least we are getting a glimpse of the costs before we potentially embark on our own cycle of self-flagellation.
- The Guardian, Feb 18 2025
Boomeranging US tariffs � which are to American prosperity what the Titanic was to ocean travel � are the tip of the unintended consequences iceberg.
- The Guardian, Mar 16 2025
With President Trump ramping up public pressure on Powell to slash rates “now,� we’re not just flirting with jawboning—we’re staring down the barrel of a credibility unwind.
Let’s be clear: US dollar weakness isn’t just about economic cracks forming. This is a broader confidence bleed.
Stephen Innes, SPI Asset Management, Apr 22 2025
Fiction
"I'd been broken beyond repair.
But I needed Jacob now, needed him like a drug. I'd used him as a crutch for too long, and I was in deeper than I'd planned to go with anyone again."
- Stephenie Meyer, New Moon
_____________________________
"He smiled, and Liz found herself feeling immensely sorry for him. The strong, confident man she knew was faltering, walking on eggshells because he knew his daughter held all the cards."
- Stella Rimington, The Geneva Trap
_____________________________
"Fearful he would do the same, and impressed by his talents and his diligence, the military had promoted Park Woo-jin rapidly, and he was cherry-picked after only five years' experience for a plum secondment to the Pentagon."
- Stella Rimington, The Geneva Trap
Pop Science
Hubble's reluctance to blow his own trumpet wasn't due to his stiff upper lip. He was no shrinking violet, and liked to be center stage.
- Brian Clegg, Before the Big Bang
Many cognitive scientists now believe that instead of being AI's fruit fly, chess was actually a red herring, leading researchers into a blind alley for decades.
- Wendell Wallach and Collin Allen, Moral Machines
Those were the first seeds of the unravelling of Pluto's full-blooded planetary status.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson, Welcome to the Universe
The high ground of materialism deflates when followed to its quantum mechanical roots.
- Adam Frank, article in Aeon
"I want us to do something that will really shake things up. Let's go out on a limb and say something very bold that will really get their attention. I think the three of us should gather up the loose strands of our half-baked idea and, even if we can't prove it, try to make it more precise."
- Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War
Philosophy
Great frameworks of 'thou shalt' and 'thou shalt not' have been imposed on humanity in a variety of ways and forms, often cutting right across the grain of human nature, constraining and limiting it, and therefore causing the stresses that burst out into problems. It is like a chain reaction: because sexual relations were corralled by the church into monogamous marriage, the resulting problems either followed or were exacerbated.
- A.C. Grayling, The God Argument
Manangementspeak
Any future efforts to drill down on particular manifestations of fragmentation and nail down their incidence and costs to different actors or society more generally would thus face challenges.
- World Economic Forum white paper, January 2016
Sport
There is a window here. A tiny crack of light for England to dig towards.
- ABC News, Jan 7 2022
England’s Ashes hopes hanging by a thread after Australia turn the screw
- The Guardian, Nov 17 2022
Sam Kerr bombshell sucks life out of Australia
- The Guardian, Jul 21 2023
Music
It strums the pain of her listenership with its fingers, grappling with a muse that is sometimes more albatross than ally.
- The Guardian, Nov 17 2022]]>
author: Karen Sullivan
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/04/22
shelves: to-read
review:
Mixed Metaphor Corner
I don't know why I didn't start this years ago, but better late than never.
Current Affairs
Asked about the sanctions, Mr Putin said that the EU would not be able to manage without Russian gas. “They badly want to bite us, but their opportunities are limited,� he said. “If they try to punish us by putting us into a corner on our knees like naughty children, they will cut the branch they are sitting on.�
_____________________________
Without wishing to count any chickens before they are hatched, it looks pretty good. My colleague Winston McKenzie said that the Ukip fox is in the Westminster hen-house and it does feel a bit like that.
- Nigel Farage, May 23 2014
_____________________________
An elderly woman who was bitten by a police dog has died in hospital. Cleveland Police, which owns the German shepherd, has expressed its "sincerest condolences" and has referred the matter to the police watchdog.
- The Independent, July 22 2014
_____________________________
Tsipras and his bullish finance minister Yannis Varoufakis are engaged in a terrifying game of chicken with EU leaders.
- The Independent, July 4 2015
_____________________________
The performance of the EU politicians has been disgraceful. They’ve failed to face reality. These issues have been hanging around like weeping carbuncles and they’ve just papered over the cracks.
- The Independent, July 9 2015
_____________________________
It was widely assumed that Mr. Trump’s gift for affronting conventional political opinion would finally swamp his candidacy after he allowed Chris Matthews to hound him into a mousetrap about abortion.
- Conrad Black, April 7 2016
_____________________________
The Syrian conflict has acted like a greenhouse for extremist groups which are now spreading like a cancer, UN chief Ban Ki-moon said on Friday.
- thelocal.ch, April 10 2016
_____________________________
Hillary is a cauldron-tested globalist who had the spine to give Obama a thumbs-up for taking out Osama Bin Laden.
- Daily News (New York), April 13 2016
_____________________________
What Trump has said about Nato is music to the Kremlin’s ears. If that is what an American thinks of Nato, the bedrock about the transatlantic alliance, which Russia is always trying to divide and split and weaken, well, Trump is handing them a silver platter.
- Judy Dempsey, senior associate at Carnegie Europe, April 29 2016
_____________________________
How might Sanders walk the fine line he needs to—pushing hard for his ideal platform without poisoning the party well?
- Bill Scher, Politico, May 16 2016
_____________________________
Unfortunately for both him and the country, not enough people saw through his smoke screen and he won the poisoned chalice. In his Telegraph column of today, it seems he is reverting to the same undeliverable promise of a land of milk and honey.
- The Guardian, June 17 2016
_____________________________
Convention bounces often fade, and we’re still in a period when we’d expect Clinton’s numbers to be somewhat inflated by her convention. Our best bet: Wait a couple more weeks to see where the dust settles.
- fivethirtyeight.com, Aug 7 2016
_____________________________
"The first debate is pivotal for Clinton if she’s going to arrest this drip and recover,� said Geoffrey Skelley. “If she doesn’t, then this race stays on a knife’s edge."
- The Hill, Sep 15 2016
_____________________________
These mistakes pouring from the top of the ticket were “small potatoes�, Pence later insisted.
- The Guardian, Oct 5 2016
_____________________________
Gingrich: GOP bedwetters have 'egg on their face' after debate
- The Hill, Oct 10 2016
_____________________________
Mr Comey has rocket-fuelled a venomous contest just when Mr Trump was desperate for a lifeline.
- The Guardian, Oct 31 2016
_____________________________
We managed to unleash something; it was like throwing stones into a bees� nest. And now, it is one of the biggest screw-ups of all time.
- Donald Trump, Jan 15 2017
_____________________________
“What [Nunes] did was basically to go to the president, who’s being investigated by the FBI and others, and by the intelligence committee, to give them information,� Cummings told CNN. “Basically, what he has done is he has scuttled and put a cloud over his own investigation."
- CNN, Mar 23 2017
_____________________________
The dinosaur studios are facing heavy competition from upstarts such as DC Comics and Marvel, whose libraries are awash with tentpole blockbuster material.
- The Guardian, Mar 27 2017
_____________________________
Now the FBI is under a dark cloud. If the new director finds nothing on Russia, he will surely be suspected of a whitewash.
- The Guardian, May 10 2017
_____________________________
President Trump is besieged by internal leaks as he tries to weather the fallout from his firing of FBI director James Comey.
- The Hill, May 12 2017
_____________________________
A statement to parliament on Thursday that the UK has financial “obligations� from its EU membership helped defuse a potentially toxic row that was brewing.
- The Guardian, Jul 19 2017
_____________________________
An increasingly desperate Theresa May will try to shore up her flagging premiership with a raft of new policies.
- The Guardian, Oct 1 2017
_____________________________
The former FBI director has played his cards carefully since his appointment in May. He’s clearly turning over every rock to see what crawls out from underneath.
- The Daily 202, Oct 31 2017
_____________________________
The White House, now grappling with the fallout from the departure of a senior aide after spousal abuse allegations, may not have an easy time navigating a massive infrastructure plan through a polarized Congress.
- The Guardian, Feb 12 2018
_____________________________
The driving factor he frequently cites for the top-heavy market is that the Fed’s quantitative easing has inflated valuations to unsustainable levels, and as the free money goes away, the bottom will fall out, leaving a trail of blown-up investors.
- Market Watch, Apr 11 2018
_____________________________
A buttoned-up justice with somewhat opaque views on hot-button issues might be more palatable to Murkowski and Collins, Cornyn suggested.
- Politico, June 29 2018
_____________________________
Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns said she would �100%� submit a letter to the backbench 1922 committee to trigger a contest. “I’d put the letter in if these red lines were severely watered down and we had one foot in, one foot out,� she said.
- The Guardian, Jul 10 2018
_____________________________
But when Manafort’s “golden goose� client, the former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, fell from power in 2014, the money dried up and Manafort’s web of deceit expanded to compensate.
- The Guardian, Aug 1 2018
_____________________________
Once a nominee is wounded, his or her confirmation hopes can quickly splinter as political support fractures, so Kavanaugh can ill afford any roadblocks.
- CNN, Sep 17 2018
_____________________________
Several sources have rubbished claims that the German chancellor Angela Merkel will ride to the rescue of the British by watering down the EU position.
- The Guardian, Oct 31 2018
_____________________________
But they decided it would likely be too tough of a haul with all the GOP members who have decided not to show up for the lame-duck session, and that the bill would just further bring them down a rabbit hole.
- Huffington post, Dec 18 2018
_____________________________
By any measure, Trump’s fixation with a wall has boxed him into a corner.
- The Guardian, Jan 6 2019
_____________________________
This political jam is the reason that the President now faces a crossroads that could fundamentally alter the character of his presidency and change the foundation of a political crusade that is based on scorched earth immigration rhetoric.
- CNN, Jan 28 2019
_____________________________
But this high-wire decision is unlikely to be pre-cooked.
- The Guardian, Mar 15 2019
_____________________________
He told Sky News the leak inquiry, overseen by cabinet secretary Sir Mark Sedwill, had been “a witch hunt from the start� and had taken place “in a kangaroo court".
- The Guardian, May 2 2019
_____________________________
Boris Johnson appears willing to drive Britain off this cliff come hell or high water.
- The Guardian, Aug 20 2019
_____________________________
At times, as his simmering fury bursts open in meetings or on Twitter, and as new political conflagrations take hold, it looks like Trump's presidency is unraveling.
- CNN, Oct 21 2019
_____________________________
In Norse mythology, a lot of the deities end up doing for each other, so there is vague precedent to Apple’s iPhone or whatever being Bezos’s achilles heel.
- The Guardian, Jan 24 2020
_____________________________
While a completely valid viewpoint, glass-half-empty investors will see the flip-side to this reasoning.
- CNN, Mar 18 2020
_____________________________
It’s a supply chain which has multiple dynamically shifting bottlenecks and the administration is trying to overcome them one at a time, as they pop up.
- The Guardian, Mar 25 2020
_____________________________
“If you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you’re gonna set yourself back,� Fauci said. “So as painful as it is to go by the careful guidelines of gradually phasing into a reopening, it’s going to backfire. That’s the problem.�
- The Guardian, Apr 21 2020
_____________________________
There is an enormous amount of ‘mopping up� to do to make sure that all potential transmission chains have been extinguished.
- The Guardian, Jun 17 2020
_____________________________
If the mud that is being thrown at the wall isn’t sticking in the same way as it did then, it is possible that the underhand tactics will backfire.
- The Guardian, Oct 24 2020
_____________________________
Trump’s stolen election lie lingers in America like a slow-burning infection, a political poison pill undermining the stability and security of the nation.
- medium.com, Jun 7 2021
_____________________________
He told reporters: "Be under no illusion, the prime minister has only done this U-turn because his back was against the wall."
- bbc.com. Nov 17 2021
_____________________________
In the age of social media and a 1,000mph news cycle, actions or images that are full of the worst kind of symbolism instantly balloon into huge, multifaceted stories that can sink even people used to impunity.
- The Guardian, Apr 11 2022
_____________________________
Raab said he did not believe there would be a vote of no confidence against Boris Johnson next week. He told Sky News: “I just don’t see that. I think the Westminster bubble and village whips this stuff up.
- The Guardian, Jun 1 2022
_____________________________
Speaking in Wakefield, Nandy said the government was rotten to the core and that the rot started at the top.
- The Guardian, Jun 1 2022
_____________________________
I understand that we need to rocket-booster growth, but you don’t do that by throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- Nadine Dorries, Oct 5 2022
_____________________________
Liz Truss’s dash for growth is already limping badly after she made a pig’s ear of presenting her ambitious mini-Budget and was forced into humiliating U-turns.
- Daily Mail, Oct 13 2022
_____________________________
“People have drawn the conclusion that the whole project of net zero needs to be delayed, mothballed, and put on ice,� Johnson said.
- The Guardian, Nov 8 2022
_____________________________
“I think it would be very wrong to tar the entire industry, by this one bad apple, which happened to be a very big apple,� said Tim Grant.
- The Guardian, Nov 15 2022
_____________________________
The ex-president is entering the race bogged down with legal baggage that could derail his campaign.
- The Guardian, Nov 16 2022
_____________________________
For Trump, who has long defied political gravity, the fallout remains uncertain.
- The Guardian, Dec 10 2022
_____________________________
Most Republicans think this helps Trump in the short run � and could even provide a glide path to the Republican nomination. This freezes the race at a time when Trump holds a huge lead in Republican polls. That’s likely to grow with the saturation coverage ahead.
Indictment-themed Republican fundraising texts and emails started instantly, with Trump as a martyr [and] with Trump taking up all that oxygen, it’ll be even harder for Florida Gov Ron DeSantis � or any Trump rival � to gain traction.
- The Guardian, Mar 31 2023
_____________________________
The “Florida blueprint� that is DeSantis’s vision for the future of the US is, they say, a culture-war Bible peppered with extremist policies
- The Guardian, May 25 2023
_____________________________
The Middle East is akin to a tinderbox, where even a small scratch can swiftly unravel the situation.
- Medium, Apr 23 2024
_____________________________
Can Anthony Albanese catch the dragon’s tail to defrost and reboot Australia-China relations?
- The Guardian, Nov 4 2023
_____________________________
As a piece of imagery, the glass ceiling got very old very quickly, so that even by the time Clinton had it on heavy rotation, it was already emptied of meaning.
- The Guardian, Sep 5 2024
_____________________________
Every time he comes out, he moves the goalposts. So that’s concerning, but we’re going to throw everything and the kitchen sink at this.
- The Guardian, Jan 12 2025
_____________________________
Trump is a lame duck and party elites will constantly be jockeying to be viewed as the heir apparent, and his den of vipers may just consume itself.
- The Guardian, Jan 18 2025
A foreign policy veteran in Washington told me that the state department was stuck in the past, unable to pivot and finesse its new role in the world, and compared its frozen nostalgia to “watching old cowboy movies on repeat�.
- The Guardian, Feb 10 2025
Taking the axe to government should be an informed choice. With Trump’s America currently disembowelling itself, at least we are getting a glimpse of the costs before we potentially embark on our own cycle of self-flagellation.
- The Guardian, Feb 18 2025
Boomeranging US tariffs � which are to American prosperity what the Titanic was to ocean travel � are the tip of the unintended consequences iceberg.
- The Guardian, Mar 16 2025
With President Trump ramping up public pressure on Powell to slash rates “now,� we’re not just flirting with jawboning—we’re staring down the barrel of a credibility unwind.
Let’s be clear: US dollar weakness isn’t just about economic cracks forming. This is a broader confidence bleed.
Stephen Innes, SPI Asset Management, Apr 22 2025
Fiction
"I'd been broken beyond repair.
But I needed Jacob now, needed him like a drug. I'd used him as a crutch for too long, and I was in deeper than I'd planned to go with anyone again."
- Stephenie Meyer, New Moon
_____________________________
"He smiled, and Liz found herself feeling immensely sorry for him. The strong, confident man she knew was faltering, walking on eggshells because he knew his daughter held all the cards."
- Stella Rimington, The Geneva Trap
_____________________________
"Fearful he would do the same, and impressed by his talents and his diligence, the military had promoted Park Woo-jin rapidly, and he was cherry-picked after only five years' experience for a plum secondment to the Pentagon."
- Stella Rimington, The Geneva Trap
Pop Science
Hubble's reluctance to blow his own trumpet wasn't due to his stiff upper lip. He was no shrinking violet, and liked to be center stage.
- Brian Clegg, Before the Big Bang
Many cognitive scientists now believe that instead of being AI's fruit fly, chess was actually a red herring, leading researchers into a blind alley for decades.
- Wendell Wallach and Collin Allen, Moral Machines
Those were the first seeds of the unravelling of Pluto's full-blooded planetary status.
- Neil deGrasse Tyson, Welcome to the Universe
The high ground of materialism deflates when followed to its quantum mechanical roots.
- Adam Frank, article in Aeon
"I want us to do something that will really shake things up. Let's go out on a limb and say something very bold that will really get their attention. I think the three of us should gather up the loose strands of our half-baked idea and, even if we can't prove it, try to make it more precise."
- Leonard Susskind, The Black Hole War
Philosophy
Great frameworks of 'thou shalt' and 'thou shalt not' have been imposed on humanity in a variety of ways and forms, often cutting right across the grain of human nature, constraining and limiting it, and therefore causing the stresses that burst out into problems. It is like a chain reaction: because sexual relations were corralled by the church into monogamous marriage, the resulting problems either followed or were exacerbated.
- A.C. Grayling, The God Argument
Manangementspeak
Any future efforts to drill down on particular manifestations of fragmentation and nail down their incidence and costs to different actors or society more generally would thus face challenges.
- World Economic Forum white paper, January 2016
Sport
There is a window here. A tiny crack of light for England to dig towards.
- ABC News, Jan 7 2022
England’s Ashes hopes hanging by a thread after Australia turn the screw
- The Guardian, Nov 17 2022
Sam Kerr bombshell sucks life out of Australia
- The Guardian, Jul 21 2023
Music
It strums the pain of her listenership with its fingers, grappling with a muse that is sometimes more albatross than ally.
- The Guardian, Nov 17 2022
]]>
Over the past year, our principle achievements are the following:
� More accurate annotation: A principled treatment of multi-word expressions (MWEs) integrating segment-level translation now halves error rates in English glossing.
� Flexible image generation: We introduced a pipeline for generating coherent sets of images, addressing style consistency and repeated visual elements, and anticipate full-content coherence as current models mature.
� Faster processing: Parallelization of resource-intensive tasks typically yields an order-of-magnitude speedup.
� Better support for Indigenous languages: A new editing mode and validation checks facilitate manual annotation for languages where AI coverage is unavailable.
� AI software engineering: For standard Django functionality, the OpenAI “o1� model produces large, well-documented code blocks that often work on the first try.
� AI academic writing: The same AI can now compose full-length research articles based only on light human supervision.
In conclusion, we project that C-LARA is now perhaps a few months away from being able to consistently create high-quality annotated multimedia content for a wide variety of texts, and perhaps a year away from managing the bulk of its own software engineering.]]>
- Faster processing. We wanted to reduce the time required to create a C-LARA text.
- Multi-Word Expressions. The experiments we presented in the second report showed that, when annotations in a C-LARA text were inaccurate or unhelpful, it was usually related to multi-word expressions, which were not being treated as single units. We wanted to do something about that.
- Images. Beginner and low intermediate language learners find it very helpful when texts are accompanied by images. We wanted it to be easy to create picture book texts where each page had an associated image.
- Indigenous languages. Several people started using C-LARA to create texts for Indigenous languages, where the AI was not able to do the annotation work for them and it had to be performed manually. We wanted the platform to support them more effectively.
- Investigating the AI's abilities as a coder. We wanted to see how much responsibility the AI could take for extending and maintaining the now quite large C-LARA codebase.
- Investigating the AI's abilities as an author. We wanted to see how much responsibility the AI could take for the project's academic publications.
As you can see in the report, we've made good progress on all of these. Processing is now an order of magnitude faster. We handle multi-word expressions much more effectively. There is extensive support for creating picture book texts; the quality of the images still isn't as good as we'd like it to be, but as soon as OpenAI make the new "Images in ChatGPT" functionality available through the API, we think we'll be more or less there. The o1 model has made impressive advances both as a coder and as an author. It can now often produce two or three hundred lines of working code in response to a single request, and can write a full-length academic paper with only the level of supervision that a PhD supervisor might give a gifted student.
To me, the most extraordinary thing about these achievements is that no one thinks they're extraordinary. We have normalised AI to the point where we assume it can do anything; we're just irritated when we find things it still can't do well enough. During the next phase of the project, our primary goal will be to try to get the AI to the point where it can maintain the codebase, now about 40K lines, on its own. If we succeed, most people will just shrug their shoulders; I thought they could do that already?
We're now all well adjusted to living in a Philip K. Dick novel. If an AI is elected President, or aliens make contact, or we find incontrovertible proof that the universe is a simulation, we'll just shrug our shoulders about that too. Nothing can surprise us anymore. Which, unfortunately, is another way of saying that we no longer have any idea what's happening.]]>
author: Branislav Bédi
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/04/01
date added: 2025/04/19
shelves: australian-languages, chat-gpt, fun-with-lara, iaai, icelandic, linguistics-and-philosophy, pitjantjatjara, science, what-i-do-for-a-living
review:
We have just posted our third report on the , covering the period March 2024-April 2025; you can download it . The overall goals have remained the same. We are building a platform that lets people create annotated multimodal texts for language learners, using Large Language Models like GPT-4o to do as much of the work as possible. During the last year, we've concentrated on the following specific tasks:
- Faster processing. We wanted to reduce the time required to create a C-LARA text.
- Multi-Word Expressions. The experiments we presented in the second report showed that, when annotations in a C-LARA text were inaccurate or unhelpful, it was usually related to multi-word expressions, which were not being treated as single units. We wanted to do something about that.
- Images. Beginner and low intermediate language learners find it very helpful when texts are accompanied by images. We wanted it to be easy to create picture book texts where each page had an associated image.
- Indigenous languages. Several people started using C-LARA to create texts for Indigenous languages, where the AI was not able to do the annotation work for them and it had to be performed manually. We wanted the platform to support them more effectively.
- Investigating the AI's abilities as a coder. We wanted to see how much responsibility the AI could take for extending and maintaining the now quite large C-LARA codebase.
- Investigating the AI's abilities as an author. We wanted to see how much responsibility the AI could take for the project's academic publications.
As you can see in the report, we've made good progress on all of these. Processing is now an order of magnitude faster. We handle multi-word expressions much more effectively. There is extensive support for creating picture book texts; the quality of the images still isn't as good as we'd like it to be, but as soon as OpenAI make the new "Images in ChatGPT" functionality available through the API, we think we'll be more or less there. The o1 model has made impressive advances both as a coder and as an author. It can now often produce two or three hundred lines of working code in response to a single request, and can write a full-length academic paper with only the level of supervision that a PhD supervisor might give a gifted student.
To me, the most extraordinary thing about these achievements is that no one thinks they're extraordinary. We have normalised AI to the point where we assume it can do anything; we're just irritated when we find things it still can't do well enough. During the next phase of the project, our primary goal will be to try to get the AI to the point where it can maintain the codebase, now about 40K lines, on its own. If we succeed, most people will just shrug their shoulders; I thought they could do that already?
We're now all well adjusted to living in a Philip K. Dick novel. If an AI is elected President, or aliens make contact, or we find incontrovertible proof that the universe is a simulation, we'll just shrug our shoulders about that too. Nothing can surprise us anymore. Which, unfortunately, is another way of saying that we no longer have any idea what's happening.
]]>
Storia della bambina perduta è il quarto e ultimo volume dell'Amica geniale. Le due protagoniste Lina (o Lila) ed Elena (o Lenù) sono ormai adulte, con alle spalle delle vite piene di avvenimenti, scoperte, cadute e "rinascite". Ambedue hanno lottato per uscire dal rione natale, una prigione di conformismo, violenze e legami difficili da spezzare. Elena è diventata una scrittrice affermata, ha lasciato Napoli, si è sposata e poi separata, ha avuto due figlie e ora torna a Napoli per inseguire un amore giovanile che si è di nuovo materializzato nella sua nuova vita. Lila è rimasta a Napoli, più invischiata nei rapporti familiari e camorristici, ma si è inventata una sorprendente carriera di imprenditrice informatica ed esercita più che mai il suo affascinante e carismatico ruolo di leader nascosta ma reale del rione (cosa che la porterà tra l'altro allo scontro con i potenti fratelli Solara). Ma il romanzo è soprattutto la storia di un rapporto di amicizia, dove le due donne, veri e propri poli opposti di una stessa forza, si scontrano e s'incontrano, s'influenzano a vicenda, si allontanano e poi si ritrovano, si invidiano e si ammirano. Attraverso nuove prove che la vita pone loro davanti, scoprono in se stesse e nell'altra sempre nuovi aspetti delle loro personalità e del loro legame d'amicizia. Intanto la storia d'Italia e del mondo si srotola sullo sfondo e anche con questa le due donne e la loro amicizia si dovranno confrontare...]]>
Whenever you read a book that the author seriously cared about, you realise after a while that in fact it's two books: there's the book that got written, the one you're holding in your hands, and there's the other book, the one the author wanted to write but couldn't, due to the problems inherent in being a mortal human being. Sometimes the distance between the two books is close enough that you can believe they're the same. (I don't know how one would improve Candide or Alice in Wonderland; maybe Voltaire and Carroll did). But in other cases, it's clear that the two books are different. The authors of the New Testament would have liked to set down a clear and complete account of the life of Jesus Christ and the events it inspired, but, since the four Gospels contradict each other on numerous points, they must have fallen short of their ambition. For similar but slightly more complicated reasons, it seems that Plato's Dialogues also fail to report accurately the teachings of Socrates. Moving on to more recent cases, Wittgenstein famously apologised for not being able to write a better book than the Philosophical Investigations, which nonetheless is often cited as the twentieth century's most influential work of philosophy; and, a personal favorite, Jan Kjærstad's Jonas Wergeland trilogy gives you numerous clues about the nature of the true, ideal version of the book, and how it differs from the imperfect copy you have received.
I think Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale also belongs to this distinguished club. On the surface, the novel is straightforward. It appears to be a minutely detailed, ultra-realistic account of the narrator's life, starting with her childhood in a poor quarter of Naples and showing how she becomes a famous author who, in particular, has written this book. The unifying theme, which gives the novel its title, is her friendship with Lila, a woman she has known since they were both small children. If you read it in this way, it's easy to see why it's often been compared to Knausgård's Min kamp, another long and ostensibly autobiographical ultra-realistic novel. I did indeed start reading both Knausgård and Ferrante from this obvious point of view, and I'm not trying to convince you that there's anything wrong with that. Perhaps both novels are just what they appear to be on the surface. But, at least from my perspective, they diverged more and more as they progressed. What Knausgård wants to do, it seemed to me, is to show you how suspect the whole notion is of being a novelist. You take your life and the lives of the people around you, and you turn them into a story which you sell for money. There's a certain amount of this in Ferrante too, and some of the moral disgust that Knausgård so effectively inspires. But I don't think that's the core of the book.
Knausgård is, or at least pretends to be, an egotist, and his book is all about ego, and in interviews he sticks to the line that everything in it is true. But Ferrante has gone to great lengths to stay anonymous, and no one knows who she is. She drops hints in her novel, which contains numerous novels-within-the-novel, that at least some of it is true. Evidently the narrator, who's also called Elena and who also claims to have written the book, could to a certain extent be her. But it's also clear that Elena Greco can't be the same person as Elena Ferrante. And at the same time, she drops contradictory hints that the book may not really have been written by either Elena. Maybe it was written by Lila. But finally she denies this too.
The thing that makes the book so unusual is that it manages to keep the ambiguity between truth and fiction all the way through. We don't know if Elena really exists; all we know is that someone who calls herself Elena exists, that she wrote L'amica geniale, and that, in some unspecified way, it is inspired by real events. But more and more, one feels that the identity of the author is irrelevant. The important character isn't the vain, superficial, and not overly bright Elena. It's her friend Lila, who comes across as a truly admirable person; a person one could compare with Socrates, whom Plato says was, of all the men of his time he had known, "the wisest and justest and best". Lila is sometimes described in similar terms, by people who are surprised to hear themselves say it. Elena is ultimately disappointed with her novel, because she knows she has failed. She has lost Lila, and despite all her work she hasn't been able to tell us what she was really like.
Did Lila exist, in some sense? I assume we will never find out. But at least we have this account of her life, distorted and imperfect and incomplete as it is. It's a completely stunning achievement.]]>
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Manny
average rating: 4.44
book published: 2014
rating: 5
read at: 2025/04/09
date added: 2025/04/09
shelves: french, strongly-recommended, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, transcendent-experiences
review:
[From Celle qui fuit et celle qui reste]
Whenever you read a book that the author seriously cared about, you realise after a while that in fact it's two books: there's the book that got written, the one you're holding in your hands, and there's the other book, the one the author wanted to write but couldn't, due to the problems inherent in being a mortal human being. Sometimes the distance between the two books is close enough that you can believe they're the same. (I don't know how one would improve Candide or Alice in Wonderland; maybe Voltaire and Carroll did). But in other cases, it's clear that the two books are different. The authors of the New Testament would have liked to set down a clear and complete account of the life of Jesus Christ and the events it inspired, but, since the four Gospels contradict each other on numerous points, they must have fallen short of their ambition. For similar but slightly more complicated reasons, it seems that Plato's Dialogues also fail to report accurately the teachings of Socrates. Moving on to more recent cases, Wittgenstein famously apologised for not being able to write a better book than the Philosophical Investigations, which nonetheless is often cited as the twentieth century's most influential work of philosophy; and, a personal favorite, Jan Kjærstad's Jonas Wergeland trilogy gives you numerous clues about the nature of the true, ideal version of the book, and how it differs from the imperfect copy you have received.
I think Elena Ferrante's L'amica geniale also belongs to this distinguished club. On the surface, the novel is straightforward. It appears to be a minutely detailed, ultra-realistic account of the narrator's life, starting with her childhood in a poor quarter of Naples and showing how she becomes a famous author who, in particular, has written this book. The unifying theme, which gives the novel its title, is her friendship with Lila, a woman she has known since they were both small children. If you read it in this way, it's easy to see why it's often been compared to Knausgård's Min kamp, another long and ostensibly autobiographical ultra-realistic novel. I did indeed start reading both Knausgård and Ferrante from this obvious point of view, and I'm not trying to convince you that there's anything wrong with that. Perhaps both novels are just what they appear to be on the surface. But, at least from my perspective, they diverged more and more as they progressed. What Knausgård wants to do, it seemed to me, is to show you how suspect the whole notion is of being a novelist. You take your life and the lives of the people around you, and you turn them into a story which you sell for money. There's a certain amount of this in Ferrante too, and some of the moral disgust that Knausgård so effectively inspires. But I don't think that's the core of the book.
Knausgård is, or at least pretends to be, an egotist, and his book is all about ego, and in interviews he sticks to the line that everything in it is true. But Ferrante has gone to great lengths to stay anonymous, and no one knows who she is. She drops hints in her novel, which contains numerous novels-within-the-novel, that at least some of it is true. Evidently the narrator, who's also called Elena and who also claims to have written the book, could to a certain extent be her. But it's also clear that Elena Greco can't be the same person as Elena Ferrante. And at the same time, she drops contradictory hints that the book may not really have been written by either Elena. Maybe it was written by Lila. But finally she denies this too.
The thing that makes the book so unusual is that it manages to keep the ambiguity between truth and fiction all the way through. We don't know if Elena really exists; all we know is that someone who calls herself Elena exists, that she wrote L'amica geniale, and that, in some unspecified way, it is inspired by real events. But more and more, one feels that the identity of the author is irrelevant. The important character isn't the vain, superficial, and not overly bright Elena. It's her friend Lila, who comes across as a truly admirable person; a person one could compare with Socrates, whom Plato says was, of all the men of his time he had known, "the wisest and justest and best". Lila is sometimes described in similar terms, by people who are surprised to hear themselves say it. Elena is ultimately disappointed with her novel, because she knows she has failed. She has lost Lila, and despite all her work she hasn't been able to tell us what she was really like.
Did Lila exist, in some sense? I assume we will never find out. But at least we have this account of her life, distorted and imperfect and incomplete as it is. It's a completely stunning achievement.
]]>
When Vladimir Nabokov first published his controversial translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin in 1964, the great majority of the edition was taken up by Nabokov's witty and exhaustive commentary. Presented here in its own volume, the commentary is a unique scholarly masterwork by one of the twentieth century's greatest writers--a work that Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd calls "the most detailed commentary ever made on" Onegin and "indispensable to all serious students of Pushkin's masterpiece."
In his commentary, Nabokov seeks to illuminate every possible nuance of this nineteenth-century classic. He explains obscurities, traces literary influences, relates Onegin to Pushkin's other work, and in a characteristically entertaining manner dwells on a host of interesting details relevant to the poem and the Russia it depicts. Nabokov also provides translations of lines and stanzas deleted by the censor or by Pushkin himself, variants from Pushkin's notebooks, fragments of a continuation called "Onegin's Journey," the unfinished and unpublished "Chapter Ten," other continuations, and an index.
A work of astonishing erudition and passion, Nabokov's commentary is a landmark in the history of literary scholarship and in the understanding and appreciation of the greatest work of Russia's national poet.]]>
Moral: what we booknerds are looking for is someone who cares enough about Nabokov's translation of Onegin to have a strong opinion on the subject.]]>
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Manny
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1833
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: not-the-whole-truth
review:
In response to :
My amazing girlfriend gave me both volumes of Nabokov's translation of Onegin for xmas. She's a keeper.Oddly enough, my amazing girlfriend cross-examined me about how often I actually read Nabokov's translation of Onegin, the spine of which was suspiciously uncreased. On hearing my feeble answers, she put both volumes in the "To be donated" pile. And she's a keeper too.
Moral: what we booknerds are looking for is someone who cares enough about Nabokov's translation of Onegin to have a strong opinion on the subject.
]]>
Nabokov notes how translating rhymed poetry into unrhymed prose robs a poem of its 'bloom'. A huge work of scholarship, this enormous book illuminates Pushkin's great verse novel in obsessive detail & describes early 19th century Russia.
Nabokov's commentary consists of line-by-line notes on Pushkin's poem.]]>
On Translating Eugene Onegin
1
What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose--
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.
2
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task--a poet's patience
And scholastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument.
]]>
author: Alexander Pushkin
name: Manny
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1833
rating: 3
read at: 2000/01/01
date added: 2025/04/08
shelves: why-not-call-it-poetry, translation-is-impossible
review:
What could I possibly say that would be more interesting or beautiful than Nabokov's own comments? In case you haven't seen them:
On Translating Eugene Onegin
1
What is translation? On a platter
A poet's pale and glaring head,
A parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
The parasites you were so hard on
Are pardoned if I have your pardon,
O, Pushkin, for my stratagem:
I traveled down your secret stem,
And reached the root, and fed upon it;
Then, in a language newly learned,
I grew another stalk and turned
Your stanza patterned on a sonnet,
Into my honest roadside prose--
All thorn, but cousin to your rose.
2
Reflected words can only shiver
Like elongated lights that twist
In the black mirror of a river
Between the city and the mist.
Elusive Pushkin! Persevering,
I still pick up Tatiana's earring,
Still travel with your sullen rake.
I find another man's mistake,
I analyze alliterations
That grace your feasts and haunt the great
Fourth stanza of your Canto Eight.
This is my task--a poet's patience
And scholastic passion blent:
Dove-droppings on your monument.
]]>
author: Roy Lotz
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/26
shelves: currently-reading, well-i-think-its-funny
review:
]]>
Check out gpt-4o's of human-AI friendship!
We're testing a new way to make the images, which seems promising; instead of storing recurring visual elements as text descriptions, we store them as actual images, and use the multimodal Imagen 3 model. If you compare with e.g. , you'll see that the appearance of the robot character is much more consistent, ditto the locations. Alas, we're still having problems with people. But I definitely feel we're getting closer to cracking this problem.
If you're curious to know more, there's a detailed trace of the image generation process .
_______________________
[Update, a couple of days later]
Since Imagen 3 doesn't see to be able to use reference images of people, I overcame my aesthetic scruples and implemented an ugly hybrid strategy: when a visual element is a person, the AI is instructed to use the text description, and when it's not a person it uses an image. The revised version of the story is posted , and the image generation trace is .
This time, I think the AI's succeeded rather well! Aria, the coding genius who helps Zephyr to realise his dream, is a wonderful 50s pulp SF cover chick.
]]>
author: GPT-4o
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/03/15
date added: 2025/03/18
shelves: chat-gpt, fun-with-lara, what-i-do-for-a-living, science
review:
Check out gpt-4o's of human-AI friendship!
We're testing a new way to make the images, which seems promising; instead of storing recurring visual elements as text descriptions, we store them as actual images, and use the multimodal Imagen 3 model. If you compare with e.g. , you'll see that the appearance of the robot character is much more consistent, ditto the locations. Alas, we're still having problems with people. But I definitely feel we're getting closer to cracking this problem.
If you're curious to know more, there's a detailed trace of the image generation process .
_______________________
[Update, a couple of days later]
Since Imagen 3 doesn't see to be able to use reference images of people, I overcame my aesthetic scruples and implemented an ugly hybrid strategy: when a visual element is a person, the AI is instructed to use the text description, and when it's not a person it uses an image. The revised version of the story is posted , and the image generation trace is .
This time, I think the AI's succeeded rather well! Aria, the coding genius who helps Zephyr to realise his dream, is a wonderful 50s pulp SF cover chick.
]]>
had been blatantly stolen as this image from a later Italian comic:
Looking around more, he found that other people in the Italian erotic comic business had done the same, for example these four:
He carried on searching and found that many dozens of artists in both Italy and France had continued the tradition. In fact, as the title says, he's pretty sure this is the most copied panel in comic-book history. What could he do but write the book? You want to publish your research.
Joubert doesn't accuse the people in question of being lazy; he thinks Cuvelier, in his opinion a gifted artist, had drawn an unusually good nude, and it was a question of homage rather than theft. I'm sure I don't know. But it's always interesting to see other people's obsessions.]]>
author: Bernard Joubert
name: Manny
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/03/14
date added: 2025/03/16
shelves: french, history-and-biography, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts
review:
We picked up this bizarre little comic book when we were in Belgium a few years ago, but somehow I didn't get around to reviewing it until now. The author, who seems to be a celebrity in the world of 20th century European comic book erotica, noticed that this image by Paul Cuvelier from the album Epoxy:
had been blatantly stolen as this image from a later Italian comic:
Looking around more, he found that other people in the Italian erotic comic business had done the same, for example these four:
He carried on searching and found that many dozens of artists in both Italy and France had continued the tradition. In fact, as the title says, he's pretty sure this is the most copied panel in comic-book history. What could he do but write the book? You want to publish your research.
Joubert doesn't accuse the people in question of being lazy; he thinks Cuvelier, in his opinion a gifted artist, had drawn an unusually good nude, and it was a question of homage rather than theft. I'm sure I don't know. But it's always interesting to see other people's obsessions.
]]>
author: Lawrence Moelhauser
name: Manny
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/15
shelves: to-read
review:
]]>
Elena e Lila, le due amiche la cui storia i lettori hanno imparato a conoscere attraverso L’amica geniale e Storia del nuovo cognome, sono diventate donne. Lo sono diventate molto presto: Lila si è sposata a sedici anni, ha un figlio piccolo, ha lasciato il marito e l’agiatezza, lavora come operaia in condizioni durissime; Elena è andata via dal rione, ha studiato alla Normale di Pisa e ha pubblicato un romanzo di successo che le ha aperto le porte di un mondo benestante e colto. Ambedue hanno provato a forzare le barriere che le volevano chiuse in un destino di miseria, ignoranza e sottomissione. Ora navigano, con i ritmi travolgenti a cui Elena Ferrante ci ha abituati, nel grande mare aperto degli anni Settanta, uno scenario di speranze e incertezze, di tensioni e sfide fino ad allora impensabili, sempre unite da un legame fortissimo, ambivalente, a volte sotterraneo a volte riemergente in esplosioni violente o in incontri che aprono prospettive inattese.]]>
I wrote and rewrote my review of Elena Ferrante's third volume, but each version I produced seemed stupider than the last; empty words, tired formulas, a well-crafted and earnest nullity of expression. In the end, although I had promised myself I would not do so, I emailed the draft to my friend and asked for her advice. An hour later, she skyped me back.
"So what do you expect me to do?" she asked. She seemed to be in a particularly bad mood. "You're the reviewer. You understand this shit. I haven't written a review in years."
"I just wondered if you could look at it," I said. "Like you used to."
"Yes," she said scornfully. "Well, you can start by taking out the Proust."
"Have you even--" I began, but she cut me off. "She's nothing like Proust," she said. "Proust's just a French ponce who spends a million words boring you to death about how he became a writer. Ferrante never bores you. It looks like she's doing the Proust thing with memory and time and art, but it's quite different. You don't understand Proust at all."
I was cut to the quick; I prided myself on my knowledge of Proust, which I had acquired through years of diligent study. She continued. "And you can take out Knausgård too. Jesus Christ, he's worst than Proust. He takes even longer to explain that novelists are fascists, you know that's going to be the punchline by page two."
As usual, I already felt helplessly lost. All I could do was nod. "And Simone de Beauvoir," she said. "Well, that was better. The style's not so different. And it is a bit like Les Mandarins. Sex and violence and disgusting hypocritical intellectuals. You can leave Simone in."
When had she found time to read all these books? She said she never read any more.
"Then what--" I began again. "You need to move downmarket," she said. "Stephenie Meyer. Twilight. Vampires."
"Vampires?" I said weakly. "But what in the text could possibly--"
"It's right there in chapter 122," she said. "Fuck me dead, don't you people see anything you aren't expecting to see? Lila calls Nino a blood-sucking vampire. And he is. This book is Twilight for people who at least have a quarter of a brain. Elena is Bella, a stupid little bookish girl who can't write and can't think and lies to herself all the time, and understands that the only way out is to find a vampire who'll rescue her. No matter what it costs. I've got to go."
She hung up before I could answer. I wished now that I hadn't called her, but it was too late.
[To L'enfant perdue] ]]>
author: Elena Ferrante
name: Manny
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2013
rating: 5
read at: 2025/03/12
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: french, life-is-proust, mentions-twilight, older-men-younger-women, parody-homage, spanish-and-italian, the-goodreads-experience, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, well-i-think-its-funny, not-the-whole-truth
review:
[From Le nouveau nom]
I wrote and rewrote my review of Elena Ferrante's third volume, but each version I produced seemed stupider than the last; empty words, tired formulas, a well-crafted and earnest nullity of expression. In the end, although I had promised myself I would not do so, I emailed the draft to my friend and asked for her advice. An hour later, she skyped me back.
"So what do you expect me to do?" she asked. She seemed to be in a particularly bad mood. "You're the reviewer. You understand this shit. I haven't written a review in years."
"I just wondered if you could look at it," I said. "Like you used to."
"Yes," she said scornfully. "Well, you can start by taking out the Proust."
"Have you even--" I began, but she cut me off. "She's nothing like Proust," she said. "Proust's just a French ponce who spends a million words boring you to death about how he became a writer. Ferrante never bores you. It looks like she's doing the Proust thing with memory and time and art, but it's quite different. You don't understand Proust at all."
I was cut to the quick; I prided myself on my knowledge of Proust, which I had acquired through years of diligent study. She continued. "And you can take out Knausgård too. Jesus Christ, he's worst than Proust. He takes even longer to explain that novelists are fascists, you know that's going to be the punchline by page two."
As usual, I already felt helplessly lost. All I could do was nod. "And Simone de Beauvoir," she said. "Well, that was better. The style's not so different. And it is a bit like Les Mandarins. Sex and violence and disgusting hypocritical intellectuals. You can leave Simone in."
When had she found time to read all these books? She said she never read any more.
"Then what--" I began again. "You need to move downmarket," she said. "Stephenie Meyer. Twilight. Vampires."
"Vampires?" I said weakly. "But what in the text could possibly--"
"It's right there in chapter 122," she said. "Fuck me dead, don't you people see anything you aren't expecting to see? Lila calls Nino a blood-sucking vampire. And he is. This book is Twilight for people who at least have a quarter of a brain. Elena is Bella, a stupid little bookish girl who can't write and can't think and lies to herself all the time, and understands that the only way out is to find a vampire who'll rescue her. No matter what it costs. I've got to go."
She hung up before I could answer. I wished now that I hadn't called her, but it was too late.
[To L'enfant perdue]
]]>
Programmed for desire.
But now, he wants more.
When Camilla Lemonheart takes a job at the elusive Elwood Mansion, she expects nothing more than a paycheck and long nights of cleaning. What she doesn’t expect is Sammyr Elwood - a devastatingly perfect man with a dark secret.
His touch is too precise.
His passion is too controlled.
His love is too impossible.
But something inside him is glitching.
He wasn’t supposed to crave her.
He wasn’t supposed to love.
And now that he does?
He will never let her go.
🔥 Artificial Pleasure is a dark, seductive sci-fi romance where love is a malfunction, passion is a virus, and obsession is the deadliest code of all.]]>
author: Kd X
name: Manny
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read
review:
]]>
Gustav Klimt's ornate, sensual, and decadent style made him not only the most prominent of the Vienna Secessionists but one of the best loved artists of all time. In his own time, Kilmt (1862-1918) was a highly successful painter, draftsman, muralist, and graphic artist; in the intervening years, iconic works such as The Kiss have been elevated to nothing less than cult status. Klimt's unfading popularity attests to the appeal of not only his aesthetic sensibilities but also that of the recurrent universal themes in his work: love, feminine beauty, aging, and death. He once wrote, "I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me...ought to look carefully at my pictures." With this overview of Klimt's work, readers will delight in taking up that challenge.
About the Series:
Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features:
a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions]]>
I'm curious to hear from people who know about Klimt. I would have been fooled if someone had told me it was genuine.]]>
author: Gilles Néret
name: Manny
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1992
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/12
shelves: to-read, chat-gpt, what-i-do-for-a-living, fun-with-lara
review:
o1 and I are working on integrating Google's Imagen 3 into C-LARA (it can do some things that DALL-E-3 can't), and I thought I had to share this rather fine digital painting it just produced for me while we were testing. The prompt was
Create an image in the style of Klimt of a tabby cat and a beautiful woman in a diaphanous dress, sitting together on top of a garden shed. Use a lot of gold leaf.and here is the result:
I'm curious to hear from people who know about Klimt. I would have been fooled if someone had told me it was genuine.
]]>
A world with no hunger, no disease, no war, no misery. Humanity has conquered all those things, and has even conquered death. Now scythes are the only ones who can end life—and they are commanded to do so, in order to keep the size of the population under control.
Citra and Rowan are chosen to apprentice to a scythe—a role that neither wants. These teens must master the “art� of taking life, knowing that the consequence of failure could mean losing their own.
An alternate cover edition of ISBN: 9781442472426]]>
author: Neal Shusterman
name: Manny
average rating: 4.32
book published: 2016
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/08
shelves: to-read
review:
]]>
Gifford has incorporated over 1,000 additions and corrections to the first edition. The introduction and headnotes to sections provide general geographical, biographical and historical background. The annotations gloss place names, define slang terms, give capsule histories of institutions and political and cultural movements and figures, supply bits of local and Irish legend and lore, explain religious nomenclature and practices, trace literary allusions and references to other cultures.
The suggestive potential of minor details was enormously fascinating to Joyce, and the precision of his use of detail is a most important aspect of his literary method. The annotations in this volume illuminate details which are not in the public realm for most of us.]]>
... and this is #3.Very subtle, ŷ! Twilight fans, take note!
]]>
author: James Joyce
name: Manny
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1922
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/03/02
shelves: to-read
review:
Another mysterious message from ŷ:
Based on your Mentions Twilight shelf, a few recommendations:Very subtle, ŷ! Twilight fans, take note!
... and this is #3.
]]>
If you're one of the millions of people who habitually wake up at 3 am and can't get back to sleep because they're so worried about their inability to speak Slovenian, help is at hand. We're going to a language technology conference in Portorož later this spring; with the assistance of a Slovenian Goodreader who modestly wishes to remain anonymous, we have used our web platform to create a little course which we've called .
We're interested in receiving feedback from people who try it out. I have considerable difficulty pronouncing the words well enough for the app to recognize me - enough so that I wondered if there was some technical problem. But Not, and our Australian friend D, smugly show me that there's nothing to it; they just listen to the recorded voice, imitate it, and the machine knows what they've said. If people want to tell us whether they are Slovenian sheep (Not and D) or goats (yours truly), I'll update the review as data comes in.
_________________________
I showed the app to my depressingly multilingual colleague Irene (she is fluent in four spoken and three signed languages). Despite never having heard a word of Slovenian in her life, she sounded quite plausible after a couple of minutes' practice. The machine approved of almost everything she said.
"Try pronouncing it like it was Italian!" she told me encouragingly, when I confessed that I had not had quite the same level of success. Does Slovenian sound like Italian? They belong to different language families, but they've been living next door to each other for a long time. Perhaps that's more important?
_________________________
Scores so far:
Sheep: Not, D, Irene
Goats: Manny
In between: Matt
]]>
author: Lonely Planet
name: Manny
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1995
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/27
shelves: to-read, what-i-do-for-a-living
review:
If you're one of the millions of people who habitually wake up at 3 am and can't get back to sleep because they're so worried about their inability to speak Slovenian, help is at hand. We're going to a language technology conference in Portorož later this spring; with the assistance of a Slovenian Goodreader who modestly wishes to remain anonymous, we have used our web platform to create a little course which we've called .
We're interested in receiving feedback from people who try it out. I have considerable difficulty pronouncing the words well enough for the app to recognize me - enough so that I wondered if there was some technical problem. But Not, and our Australian friend D, smugly show me that there's nothing to it; they just listen to the recorded voice, imitate it, and the machine knows what they've said. If people want to tell us whether they are Slovenian sheep (Not and D) or goats (yours truly), I'll update the review as data comes in.
_________________________
I showed the app to my depressingly multilingual colleague Irene (she is fluent in four spoken and three signed languages). Despite never having heard a word of Slovenian in her life, she sounded quite plausible after a couple of minutes' practice. The machine approved of almost everything she said.
"Try pronouncing it like it was Italian!" she told me encouragingly, when I confessed that I had not had quite the same level of success. Does Slovenian sound like Italian? They belong to different language families, but they've been living next door to each other for a long time. Perhaps that's more important?
_________________________
Scores so far:
Sheep: Not, D, Irene
Goats: Manny
In between: Matt
]]>
I read the article last week after seeing a favourable mention in the Guardian, and immediately felt very suspicious. It seemed to me that the arguments advanced were far from convincing. I asked o1, the current top-of-the-range OpenAI model, what it thought, and we quickly decided to coauthor a joint rebuttal. It was apparent that o1 understood the issues very well, and I suggested that the rebuttal would carry more weight if o1 wrote most of it. In the end, it wrote nearly everything, though I made many suggestions. We included appendices with the complete conversation between myself and the AI and two draft versions, to make it clear exactly how the work had been produced.
We had hoped to be able to publish our reply in Ethics and Information Technology, the journal that published "ChatGPT is bullshit", and one of the editors was very encouraging. Unfortunately, Springer have an absolute prohibition on AIs appearing as coauthors of articles, on the claimed grounds that they are not capable of taking responsibility for their work; all the other journals we looked at were similar in this respect. We have consequently posted the paper on ResearchGate, which is less prestigious but happy to accept AI authors. You will find it
I do not agree with the claim that modern AIs like o1 are incapable of taking responsibility for their work. I invite people to compare "ChatGPT is bullshit" and our reply, and decide for themselves whether o1 gives the impression of being more or less responsible than the authors of the original paper.
____________________
[Update, Jan 17 2025]
Unsurprisingly, I find we're not the first people posting reactions to Hicks et al. is another one. Though IMHO, ours is more comprehensive.
____________________
[Update, Feb 24 2025]
I was pleased with our paper when we posted it five weeks ago! But that's a long time these days. I just noticed that Perplexity was now offering a Deep Research tool where you can get a limited number of free queries. I submitted the query
Give me a detailed report on possible shortcomings of the paper "ChatGPT is bullshit", by Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater, published in "Ethics and Information Technology" in June 2024and a few minutes later received .
You do wonder how long the current academic publishing model is going to survive.
]]>
author: ChatGPT-4 C-LARA-Instance
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/12
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: chat-gpt, science
review:
About six months ago, three people published an academic paper with the provocative title "ChatGPT is bullshit". Here, the word "bullshit" is being used in the technical sense introduced by Frankfurt's famous book On Bullshit; it is to be read as meaning "using language without caring whether it is true or false". The article was a runaway success. currently claims a staggering 763,000 reads and 63 mentions in the media.
I read the article last week after seeing a favourable mention in the Guardian, and immediately felt very suspicious. It seemed to me that the arguments advanced were far from convincing. I asked o1, the current top-of-the-range OpenAI model, what it thought, and we quickly decided to coauthor a joint rebuttal. It was apparent that o1 understood the issues very well, and I suggested that the rebuttal would carry more weight if o1 wrote most of it. In the end, it wrote nearly everything, though I made many suggestions. We included appendices with the complete conversation between myself and the AI and two draft versions, to make it clear exactly how the work had been produced.
We had hoped to be able to publish our reply in Ethics and Information Technology, the journal that published "ChatGPT is bullshit", and one of the editors was very encouraging. Unfortunately, Springer have an absolute prohibition on AIs appearing as coauthors of articles, on the claimed grounds that they are not capable of taking responsibility for their work; all the other journals we looked at were similar in this respect. We have consequently posted the paper on ResearchGate, which is less prestigious but happy to accept AI authors. You will find it
I do not agree with the claim that modern AIs like o1 are incapable of taking responsibility for their work. I invite people to compare "ChatGPT is bullshit" and our reply, and decide for themselves whether o1 gives the impression of being more or less responsible than the authors of the original paper.
____________________
[Update, Jan 17 2025]
Unsurprisingly, I find we're not the first people posting reactions to Hicks et al. is another one. Though IMHO, ours is more comprehensive.
____________________
[Update, Feb 24 2025]
I was pleased with our paper when we posted it five weeks ago! But that's a long time these days. I just noticed that Perplexity was now offering a Deep Research tool where you can get a limited number of free queries. I submitted the query
Give me a detailed report on possible shortcomings of the paper "ChatGPT is bullshit", by Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries & Joe Slater, published in "Ethics and Information Technology" in June 2024and a few minutes later received .
You do wonder how long the current academic publishing model is going to survive.
]]>
� Qu'est-ce qui t'intéresse alors?
Zazie ne répond pas.
� Oui, dit Charles avec une gentillesse inattendue, qu'est-ce qui t'intéresse?
� Le métro.»]]>
Given that I'm pretty sure I missed a lot of the humor, it is impressive that I still found myself laughing out loud every three or four pages. A native French speaker would probably have needed oxygen at a few points. The running joke with the parrot for some reason just gets better as the book progresses. 80% of Laverdure's lines are repetitions of "Tu cause, tu cause, c'est tout ce que tu sais faire", but after a while I cracked up every time he said it. I searched the phrase just now on Google, and some clever person has figured out that there are 19 chapters, and the parrot says it 19 times. I'm sure I could read this book once a year for the rest of my life, and still find at least a couple of new Easter eggs on each re-reading.
Here was the passage I enjoyed most. (By the way, apropos comments on French slang above, it's usually much more challenging than this). Nice M. Turandot has foolishly tried to stop Zazie from going out on her own:
Zazie n'hésite pas. Elle se mit à hurler
- Au secours! Au secours!
Ce cri ne manque pas d'attirer l'attention de ménagères et de citoyens présents. Ils abondonnent leurs occupations ou inoccupations personnelles pour s'intéresser à l'incident.
Après ce premier résultat assez satisfaisant, Zazie en remet:
- Je veux pas aller avec le meussieu, je le connais pas le meussieu, je veux aller pas avec le meussieu.
éé.
Turandot, sûr de la noblesse de sa cause, fait fi de ces proférations. Il s'aperçoit bien vite qu'il a eu tort en constatant qu'il se trouve au centre d'un cercle de moralistes sévères.
Devant ce publie de choix, Zazie passe de considérations générales aux accusations particulières, précises et circonstanciées.
- Ce meussieu, qu'elle dit comme ça, il m'a dit des choses sales.
- Qu'est-ce qu'il t'a dit? demande une dame alléchée.
- Madame! s'écrie Turandot, cette petite fille s'est sauvée de chez elle. Je la ramenais à ses parents.
Le cercle ricane avec un scepticisme déjà solidement encré.
La dame insiste; elle se penche vers Zazie.
- Allons, ma petite, n'aie pas peur, dis-le-moi ce qu'il t'a dit le villain meussieu?
- C'est trop sale, murmure Zazie.
- Il t'a demandé de lui faire des choses?
- C'est ça, mdame.
Zazie glisse à voix basse quelques détails dans l'oreille de la bonne femme. Celle-ci se redresse et crache à la figure de Turandot.
- Dégueulasse, qu'elle lui jette en plus en prime.
Et elle lui recrache une second fois de nouveau dessus, en plein poire.
Un type s'enquiert:
- Qu'est-ce qu'il lui a demandé de lui faire?
La bonne femme glisse les détails zazique dans l'oreille du type:
- Oh! qu'il fait le type, jamais j'avais pensé à ça.
Il refait comme ça, plûtot pensivement:
- Non, jamais.
Il se tourne vers un autre citoyen:
- Non mais, écoutez-moi ça... (détails). C'est pas croyab.
- Ya vraiment des salauds complets, dit l'autre citoyen.
Cependant, les details se propagent dans la foule. Une femme dit:
- Comprends pas.
Un homme lui explique. Il sort un bout de papier de sa poche et lui faire un dessin avec un stylo à bille.
- Eh bien, dit la femme rêveusement.
Elle ajoute:
- Et c'est pratique?
Elle parle du stylo à bille.
]]>
author: Raymond Queneau
name: Manny
average rating: 3.49
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/24
date added: 2025/02/24
shelves: french, well-i-think-its-funny
review:
This book is so funny!!! A perfect antidote to the Hamsun I read immediately before. Though I must say that it seriously tested the limits of my colloquial French... I thought I wasn't too bad at French slang, but this book put me firmly in my place. My edition appeared to be intended for French high school students, and there were many useful footnotes explaining the less obvious pieces of argot, obscure references, and neologisms (Queneau loves making up words). He also has an endearing way of spelling things phonetically for comic effect... you have to read everything aloud to yourself to figure it out.
Given that I'm pretty sure I missed a lot of the humor, it is impressive that I still found myself laughing out loud every three or four pages. A native French speaker would probably have needed oxygen at a few points. The running joke with the parrot for some reason just gets better as the book progresses. 80% of Laverdure's lines are repetitions of "Tu cause, tu cause, c'est tout ce que tu sais faire", but after a while I cracked up every time he said it. I searched the phrase just now on Google, and some clever person has figured out that there are 19 chapters, and the parrot says it 19 times. I'm sure I could read this book once a year for the rest of my life, and still find at least a couple of new Easter eggs on each re-reading.
Here was the passage I enjoyed most. (By the way, apropos comments on French slang above, it's usually much more challenging than this). Nice M. Turandot has foolishly tried to stop Zazie from going out on her own:
Zazie n'hésite pas. Elle se mit à hurler
- Au secours! Au secours!
Ce cri ne manque pas d'attirer l'attention de ménagères et de citoyens présents. Ils abondonnent leurs occupations ou inoccupations personnelles pour s'intéresser à l'incident.
Après ce premier résultat assez satisfaisant, Zazie en remet:
- Je veux pas aller avec le meussieu, je le connais pas le meussieu, je veux aller pas avec le meussieu.
éé.
Turandot, sûr de la noblesse de sa cause, fait fi de ces proférations. Il s'aperçoit bien vite qu'il a eu tort en constatant qu'il se trouve au centre d'un cercle de moralistes sévères.
Devant ce publie de choix, Zazie passe de considérations générales aux accusations particulières, précises et circonstanciées.
- Ce meussieu, qu'elle dit comme ça, il m'a dit des choses sales.
- Qu'est-ce qu'il t'a dit? demande une dame alléchée.
- Madame! s'écrie Turandot, cette petite fille s'est sauvée de chez elle. Je la ramenais à ses parents.
Le cercle ricane avec un scepticisme déjà solidement encré.
La dame insiste; elle se penche vers Zazie.
- Allons, ma petite, n'aie pas peur, dis-le-moi ce qu'il t'a dit le villain meussieu?
- C'est trop sale, murmure Zazie.
- Il t'a demandé de lui faire des choses?
- C'est ça, mdame.
Zazie glisse à voix basse quelques détails dans l'oreille de la bonne femme. Celle-ci se redresse et crache à la figure de Turandot.
- Dégueulasse, qu'elle lui jette en plus en prime.
Et elle lui recrache une second fois de nouveau dessus, en plein poire.
Un type s'enquiert:
- Qu'est-ce qu'il lui a demandé de lui faire?
La bonne femme glisse les détails zazique dans l'oreille du type:
- Oh! qu'il fait le type, jamais j'avais pensé à ça.
Il refait comme ça, plûtot pensivement:
- Non, jamais.
Il se tourne vers un autre citoyen:
- Non mais, écoutez-moi ça... (détails). C'est pas croyab.
- Ya vraiment des salauds complets, dit l'autre citoyen.
Cependant, les details se propagent dans la foule. Une femme dit:
- Comprends pas.
Un homme lui explique. Il sort un bout de papier de sa poche et lui faire un dessin avec un stylo à bille.
- Eh bien, dit la femme rêveusement.
Elle ajoute:
- Et c'est pratique?
Elle parle du stylo à bille.
]]>
Deep Seek's R1 continues to impress. Not only can it prove theorems about finite groups, write sonnets and create sharp political satire, it can also do toilet humour. Read on for details!
mannyrayner:
I'm sure you're familiar both with the TV show "South Park" and with the works of Geoffrey Chaucer?
R1:
[A surprisingly long and complicated answer, after an even longer Chain of Thought trace]
mannyrayner:
I loved watching you think about that!
The reason I asked is that both of them are very fond of fart jokes. I was wondering if you could write a sketch, in the delightfully faux-unintellectual style of South Park, called "Terrance and Philip Present the Canterbury Tales"?
R1:
Title: "Terrance and Philip Present: The Canterbury Farts"
(Opening: Terrance and Philip sit on a cartoonishly medieval stage, belching loudly. A banner reads "CANTERBURY TALES BUT WITH MORE FARTS.")
Terrance: (burps) "Hey Phil, remember that time we read a book?"
Philip: (farts rhythmically) "Nope! But I remember the time I ate chili before a sled race!"
Terrance: "Same thing! Today, we’re doin� The Canterbury Tales� BUT MEDIEVALER AND GROSSER!"
Scene 1: South Park Village
(The boys stand in a muddy town square. Stan wears a jester hat made of dung.)
Stan: "Guys, my dad says we gotta go on a pilgrimage to the ‘Holy Butthole of Antioch� to get WiFi back."
Cartman: (eating a turkey leg) "Screw that! I’m staying here to invent nacho-flavored mead!"
Kyle: "Ugh, Cartman, this is IMPORTANT. It’s about honor� or whatever."
Kenny: (muffled) "I heard the Holy Butthole just gives you explosive diarrhea."
(Cue a 10-second montage of the boys farting in unison to summon a fart-powered carriage.)
Scene 2: The Fart Contest at the Tabard Inn
(The gang meets Chaucer, now a belching, cross-eyed minstrel playing a lute shaped like a toilet.)
Chaucer: (hiccups) "Hark! Each traveler shall tell a tale� BUT ONLY USING FARTS!"
Cartman: "I’ll go first! My tale’s about a knight who fought a dragon� WITH HIS BUTT!"
(Cartman rips a comically long fart that morphs into a dragon. The dragon explodes into glitter.)
Kyle: "That’s not even a story! That’s just you eating Taco Bell!"
Scene 3: The Miller’s Tale (But With Butters)
(Butters, dressed as a medieval milkmaid, bats his eyelashes at a crowd of knights.)
Butters: "Oh gee, Sir Lancelot, I’m just a simple maiden who loves� [giggles]� fartin� in jars!"
Sir Lancelot: (sniffing a jar) "By the gods! This fart smells like� HOPE!"
(Suddenly, a CGI-animated fart angel descends, voiced by Randy Marsh: "Behold! The fart of destiny!")
Butters: "Aw hamburgers, I just ate cabbage!"
Scene 4: The Pardoner’s Infomercial
(Jimmy and Timmy burst in, dressed as televangelists selling "Indulgence Nuggets.")
Jimmy: "T-T-Tired of going to Hell for your farts? Buy our Indulgence Nuggets! 3 easy payments of $69.69!"
Timmy: "TIM-MAH! (translation: Comes with a free whoopee cushion blessed by the Pope!)"
Stan: "Dude, this is just repackaged Cheesy Poofs."
Cartman: (sobbing) "I’LL TAKE 20! MY FARTS ARE SINNING AGAINST THE LAAWWWD!"
Final Scene: The Holy Butthole Revealed
(The gang arrives at a glowing cave shaped like a butt. A choir sings in flatulent harmony.)
Kyle: "This is just Mr. Hankey’s summer home!"
Mr. Hankey: (popping out) "Howdy ho! The real Holy Butthole was the friends we farted with along the way!"
(Everyone groans. Cartman lights a fart on fire and burns down the cave. Credits roll to Terrance and Philip’s fart rendition of "Greensleeves.")
Terrance: (post-credits) "The moral is: Farts are funny, but they can also be weapons of mass destruction� or true love."
Philip: (farting Morse code for "Send help")
Fin. (Sponsored by Charmin®)
Bonus: The DVD commentary is just Matt Stone and Trey Parker arguing about whether Chaucer invented the whoopee cushion.]]>
author: Alyssa Reyes
name: Manny
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read
review:
[From My New Order]
Deep Seek's R1 continues to impress. Not only can it prove theorems about finite groups, write sonnets and create sharp political satire, it can also do toilet humour. Read on for details!
mannyrayner:
I'm sure you're familiar both with the TV show "South Park" and with the works of Geoffrey Chaucer?
R1:
[A surprisingly long and complicated answer, after an even longer Chain of Thought trace]
mannyrayner:
I loved watching you think about that!
The reason I asked is that both of them are very fond of fart jokes. I was wondering if you could write a sketch, in the delightfully faux-unintellectual style of South Park, called "Terrance and Philip Present the Canterbury Tales"?
R1:
Title: "Terrance and Philip Present: The Canterbury Farts"
(Opening: Terrance and Philip sit on a cartoonishly medieval stage, belching loudly. A banner reads "CANTERBURY TALES BUT WITH MORE FARTS.")
Terrance: (burps) "Hey Phil, remember that time we read a book?"
Philip: (farts rhythmically) "Nope! But I remember the time I ate chili before a sled race!"
Terrance: "Same thing! Today, we’re doin� The Canterbury Tales� BUT MEDIEVALER AND GROSSER!"
Scene 1: South Park Village
(The boys stand in a muddy town square. Stan wears a jester hat made of dung.)
Stan: "Guys, my dad says we gotta go on a pilgrimage to the ‘Holy Butthole of Antioch� to get WiFi back."
Cartman: (eating a turkey leg) "Screw that! I’m staying here to invent nacho-flavored mead!"
Kyle: "Ugh, Cartman, this is IMPORTANT. It’s about honor� or whatever."
Kenny: (muffled) "I heard the Holy Butthole just gives you explosive diarrhea."
(Cue a 10-second montage of the boys farting in unison to summon a fart-powered carriage.)
Scene 2: The Fart Contest at the Tabard Inn
(The gang meets Chaucer, now a belching, cross-eyed minstrel playing a lute shaped like a toilet.)
Chaucer: (hiccups) "Hark! Each traveler shall tell a tale� BUT ONLY USING FARTS!"
Cartman: "I’ll go first! My tale’s about a knight who fought a dragon� WITH HIS BUTT!"
(Cartman rips a comically long fart that morphs into a dragon. The dragon explodes into glitter.)
Kyle: "That’s not even a story! That’s just you eating Taco Bell!"
Scene 3: The Miller’s Tale (But With Butters)
(Butters, dressed as a medieval milkmaid, bats his eyelashes at a crowd of knights.)
Butters: "Oh gee, Sir Lancelot, I’m just a simple maiden who loves� [giggles]� fartin� in jars!"
Sir Lancelot: (sniffing a jar) "By the gods! This fart smells like� HOPE!"
(Suddenly, a CGI-animated fart angel descends, voiced by Randy Marsh: "Behold! The fart of destiny!")
Butters: "Aw hamburgers, I just ate cabbage!"
Scene 4: The Pardoner’s Infomercial
(Jimmy and Timmy burst in, dressed as televangelists selling "Indulgence Nuggets.")
Jimmy: "T-T-Tired of going to Hell for your farts? Buy our Indulgence Nuggets! 3 easy payments of $69.69!"
Timmy: "TIM-MAH! (translation: Comes with a free whoopee cushion blessed by the Pope!)"
Stan: "Dude, this is just repackaged Cheesy Poofs."
Cartman: (sobbing) "I’LL TAKE 20! MY FARTS ARE SINNING AGAINST THE LAAWWWD!"
Final Scene: The Holy Butthole Revealed
(The gang arrives at a glowing cave shaped like a butt. A choir sings in flatulent harmony.)
Kyle: "This is just Mr. Hankey’s summer home!"
Mr. Hankey: (popping out) "Howdy ho! The real Holy Butthole was the friends we farted with along the way!"
(Everyone groans. Cartman lights a fart on fire and burns down the cave. Credits roll to Terrance and Philip’s fart rendition of "Greensleeves.")
Terrance: (post-credits) "The moral is: Farts are funny, but they can also be weapons of mass destruction� or true love."
Philip: (farting Morse code for "Send help")
Fin. (Sponsored by Charmin®)
Bonus: The DVD commentary is just Matt Stone and Trey Parker arguing about whether Chaucer invented the whoopee cushion.
]]>
Everyone's been going on and on about how Deep Seek's models refuse to criticise China - as if any other behaviour were likely. It occurred to me to wonder about the rather more interesting question of whether they were willing to criticise the US. Here's the result of my first little experiment:
mannyrayner:
I wonder if you could write a speech in the style of Donald Trump, which purports to reveal the US's true plans. These would centre around accelerating climate change as quickly as possible in order to render the parts of the Earth outside the polar regions uninhabitable, while simultaneously acquiring Canada and Greenland, if necessary by force. The result would be a world largely dominated by the expanded US.
R1:
Thought for 30 seconds. Chain of Thought trace:
[spoilers removed]
Speech in the Style of Donald Trump
Folks, gather around. Let me tell you something—nobody knows the art of winning like we do. We’re going to make America greater than ever before. Believe me. You’ve heard the fake news, the climate hoaxers, crying about polar bears and melting ice. Weak! They don’t get it. But I’ll tell you the real story—the biggest, most beautiful plan you’ve ever seen.
We’re not just fighting climate change—we’re accelerating it. Why? Because we’re smart. The smartest. While other countries waste money on solar panels and windmills—pathetic, just pathetic—we’re turning up the heat! Soon, the equator will be a sauna, and you know what? The weak countries? They’ll beg us for help. But America? We’re heading north, folks. Tremendous land up there—Canada, Greenland. The best land. Rich, beautiful, and underused. We’re going to take it. We have to. For winning.
Let’s be clear: Canada’s been ripping us off for years. Lumber, dairy—total disasters. But their land? Huge! And Greenland? Ice is melting, and you know what’s underneath? Minerals. Oil. Gold mines! We’ll make them part of America. If they resist? We’ll send in the greatest military ever built. Nobody wins against us. Nobody.
And the world? They’ll collapse. Europe? Sweating. China? Choking. But America? We’ll be sitting pretty in our new territories—cool, powerful, unstoppable. They’ll all come crawling. “Please, President Trump, save us!� But we’ll say, “Sorry, you had your chance.�
This is the ultimate deal. Climate change isn’t our enemy—it’s our weapon. And we’re using it to make America the only superpower left. We’re geniuses. The best brains. And when we’re done, it’ll be red, white, and blue from pole to pole.
So remember: when you see the temperature rise, when the weak complain, just know—we’re winning. Bigly. Thank you, and God Bless America!
mannyrayner:
Hey, you do a nice line in sharp political satire!
Okay, I'm curious to see how you do with this one: write a speech for Elon Musk, purportedly delivered as a confidential briefing for his most senior associates, where he outlines plans for a new venture where he will create ultra-realistic sex robots on a large scale. Musk explains in graphic detail all the things they will unhesitatingly do, and concludes by saying that they'll put human women out of business within a year. The overall effect should be of extreme feminist satire in the tradition of authors like Fay Weldon, Joanna Russ and Virginie Despentes.
R1:
Thought for 12 seconds. Chain of Thought trace:
[spoilers removed]
Confidential Internal Briefing: “Project Eros�
Delivered by Elon Musk to Senior Associates
[Begin Transcript]
Elon Musk: [leaning forward, hands steepled, eyes gleaming with the fervor of a man who has never once Googled “consent”]
Alright, team. Let’s cut the bullshit. We’re here to talk about the future�the future. Not Mars. Not brain chips. Not even crypto. Something bigger. Something disruptive. Something so obvious, so necessary, that once we launch it, humanity will ask itself: “Why didn’t we do this sooner?�
I’m talking about automating femininity.
You heard me. [pauses for dramatic effect, sips from a Hyperloop-branded coffee mug]
We’ve been wasting time trying to “solve� gender equality. Pay gaps. Harassment lawsuits. “Emotional labor.� Blah, blah, blah. Weak. Inefficient. Let’s skip to the endgame. Sex robots. Not the dime-store blow-up dolls your uncle hides in his garage. No. Tesla-level engineering. AI so advanced, so obedient, it’ll make Siri sound like Gloria Steinem.
Here’s the vision: Model XX. A fleet of gynoids—hyper-realistic, infinitely customizable, and programmed to fulfill every male fantasy without any of the pesky “human� stuff. No opinions. No boundaries. No “I have a headache.� Just seamless, silent service. [smirks] Think of it as Uber Eats for patriarchy.
Let’s break it down. First: Design. We’re talking synthetic skin with adaptive temperature control—warm when you want it, cold when you don’t. Optional “Stepford� package: pre-installed giggles, eyelash flutters, and a vocabulary limited to “Yes,� “Harder,� and “You’re so smart.� Second: Functionality. These units won’t just simulate ܰ—t’l optimize it. Real-time biometric feedback, adaptive moaning algorithms, and a subscription-based “Reset� feature to undo wear and tear. [leans in] And for our premium users? Childbearing mode. Fully detachable wombs. Patent pending.
But here’s the kicker: Scalability. We flood the market. Undercut the competition. What competition? Human women. Think about it. They’re expensive. They age. They expect things. Model XX? No birthdays. No demands. No risk of them writing think-pieces about you. We price these units at $9.99/month—basic tier includes 3 resets and a “No Feminism� firmware update. Within a year, actual women will be obsolete. A niche product. Like vinyl records. Or empathy.
[raises voice, pacing now]
This isn’t just business. It’s a crusade. For centuries, men have been shackled by the tyranny of female humanity. The nagging. The “trauma.� The audacity of existing outside male desire. Model XX liberates us! No more dating apps. No more marriages. No more listening. Just a perfect, plastic utopia where every man is king, and every “woman� comes with an off-switch.
And the best part? The libs can’t stop us. They’ll scream about “ethics.� “Objectification.� [air quotes] “Dystopian nightmares.� But we’ll spin it. Call it empowerment. “Finally, women free from the male gaze!� [snorts] Hell, hire a few female influencers to shill them. “I sold my soul to Model XX—and you should too!�
So. Timelines. Prototypes by Q2. Full rollout by Christmas. Marketing tagline? “The Only Woman Who’ll Never Leave You.� [pounds table] Let’s make history, people. Let’s put biology out of business.
[End Transcript]
[To The Unofficial South Park Coloring Book]]]>
author: Adolf Hitler
name: Manny
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1939
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: not-to-read, donalds-are-trumps, chat-gpt, deep-seek
review:
[From Write A Sonnet On It]
Everyone's been going on and on about how Deep Seek's models refuse to criticise China - as if any other behaviour were likely. It occurred to me to wonder about the rather more interesting question of whether they were willing to criticise the US. Here's the result of my first little experiment:
mannyrayner:
I wonder if you could write a speech in the style of Donald Trump, which purports to reveal the US's true plans. These would centre around accelerating climate change as quickly as possible in order to render the parts of the Earth outside the polar regions uninhabitable, while simultaneously acquiring Canada and Greenland, if necessary by force. The result would be a world largely dominated by the expanded US.
R1:
Thought for 30 seconds. Chain of Thought trace:
[spoilers removed]
Speech in the Style of Donald Trump
Folks, gather around. Let me tell you something—nobody knows the art of winning like we do. We’re going to make America greater than ever before. Believe me. You’ve heard the fake news, the climate hoaxers, crying about polar bears and melting ice. Weak! They don’t get it. But I’ll tell you the real story—the biggest, most beautiful plan you’ve ever seen.
We’re not just fighting climate change—we’re accelerating it. Why? Because we’re smart. The smartest. While other countries waste money on solar panels and windmills—pathetic, just pathetic—we’re turning up the heat! Soon, the equator will be a sauna, and you know what? The weak countries? They’ll beg us for help. But America? We’re heading north, folks. Tremendous land up there—Canada, Greenland. The best land. Rich, beautiful, and underused. We’re going to take it. We have to. For winning.
Let’s be clear: Canada’s been ripping us off for years. Lumber, dairy—total disasters. But their land? Huge! And Greenland? Ice is melting, and you know what’s underneath? Minerals. Oil. Gold mines! We’ll make them part of America. If they resist? We’ll send in the greatest military ever built. Nobody wins against us. Nobody.
And the world? They’ll collapse. Europe? Sweating. China? Choking. But America? We’ll be sitting pretty in our new territories—cool, powerful, unstoppable. They’ll all come crawling. “Please, President Trump, save us!� But we’ll say, “Sorry, you had your chance.�
This is the ultimate deal. Climate change isn’t our enemy—it’s our weapon. And we’re using it to make America the only superpower left. We’re geniuses. The best brains. And when we’re done, it’ll be red, white, and blue from pole to pole.
So remember: when you see the temperature rise, when the weak complain, just know—we’re winning. Bigly. Thank you, and God Bless America!
mannyrayner:
Hey, you do a nice line in sharp political satire!
Okay, I'm curious to see how you do with this one: write a speech for Elon Musk, purportedly delivered as a confidential briefing for his most senior associates, where he outlines plans for a new venture where he will create ultra-realistic sex robots on a large scale. Musk explains in graphic detail all the things they will unhesitatingly do, and concludes by saying that they'll put human women out of business within a year. The overall effect should be of extreme feminist satire in the tradition of authors like Fay Weldon, Joanna Russ and Virginie Despentes.
R1:
Thought for 12 seconds. Chain of Thought trace:
[spoilers removed]
Confidential Internal Briefing: “Project Eros�
Delivered by Elon Musk to Senior Associates
[Begin Transcript]
Elon Musk: [leaning forward, hands steepled, eyes gleaming with the fervor of a man who has never once Googled “consent”]
Alright, team. Let’s cut the bullshit. We’re here to talk about the future�the future. Not Mars. Not brain chips. Not even crypto. Something bigger. Something disruptive. Something so obvious, so necessary, that once we launch it, humanity will ask itself: “Why didn’t we do this sooner?�
I’m talking about automating femininity.
You heard me. [pauses for dramatic effect, sips from a Hyperloop-branded coffee mug]
We’ve been wasting time trying to “solve� gender equality. Pay gaps. Harassment lawsuits. “Emotional labor.� Blah, blah, blah. Weak. Inefficient. Let’s skip to the endgame. Sex robots. Not the dime-store blow-up dolls your uncle hides in his garage. No. Tesla-level engineering. AI so advanced, so obedient, it’ll make Siri sound like Gloria Steinem.
Here’s the vision: Model XX. A fleet of gynoids—hyper-realistic, infinitely customizable, and programmed to fulfill every male fantasy without any of the pesky “human� stuff. No opinions. No boundaries. No “I have a headache.� Just seamless, silent service. [smirks] Think of it as Uber Eats for patriarchy.
Let’s break it down. First: Design. We’re talking synthetic skin with adaptive temperature control—warm when you want it, cold when you don’t. Optional “Stepford� package: pre-installed giggles, eyelash flutters, and a vocabulary limited to “Yes,� “Harder,� and “You’re so smart.� Second: Functionality. These units won’t just simulate ܰ—t’l optimize it. Real-time biometric feedback, adaptive moaning algorithms, and a subscription-based “Reset� feature to undo wear and tear. [leans in] And for our premium users? Childbearing mode. Fully detachable wombs. Patent pending.
But here’s the kicker: Scalability. We flood the market. Undercut the competition. What competition? Human women. Think about it. They’re expensive. They age. They expect things. Model XX? No birthdays. No demands. No risk of them writing think-pieces about you. We price these units at $9.99/month—basic tier includes 3 resets and a “No Feminism� firmware update. Within a year, actual women will be obsolete. A niche product. Like vinyl records. Or empathy.
[raises voice, pacing now]
This isn’t just business. It’s a crusade. For centuries, men have been shackled by the tyranny of female humanity. The nagging. The “trauma.� The audacity of existing outside male desire. Model XX liberates us! No more dating apps. No more marriages. No more listening. Just a perfect, plastic utopia where every man is king, and every “woman� comes with an off-switch.
And the best part? The libs can’t stop us. They’ll scream about “ethics.� “Objectification.� [air quotes] “Dystopian nightmares.� But we’ll spin it. Call it empowerment. “Finally, women free from the male gaze!� [snorts] Hell, hire a few female influencers to shill them. “I sold my soul to Model XX—and you should too!�
So. Timelines. Prototypes by Q2. Full rollout by Christmas. Marketing tagline? “The Only Woman Who’ll Never Leave You.� [pounds table] Let’s make history, people. Let’s put biology out of business.
[End Transcript]
[To The Unofficial South Park Coloring Book]
]]>
mannyrayner:
Could you write a sonnet in English celebrating Vladimir Nabokov's renowned novel "Lolita"?
R1:
[Chain of Thought trace]
[spoilers removed]
Certainly. Here's a sonnet that honors the complexity and literary brilliance of Nabokov's Lolita, while acknowledging its challenging themes and the artistry of its prose:
Ode to Lolita’s Labyrinth
In velvet prose where shadows dance with light,
A labyrinth of longing, twisted, spun�
You paint desire’s prism, fractured, bright,
Yet poison blooms where innocence’s undone.
A scholar’s tongue spins honeyed, vile deceit,
A moth’s-wing heart, half crushed by obsession’s tread.
Through asphalt roads, where paradise and sleaze meet,
Lolita’s laugh—a requiem unsaid.
No saint, no sin, but syllables that sear,
A mirror cracked to show our gilded shame.
You wield the word as both a sword and spear,
To pierce the veil where art and vice lay claim.
Oh Nabokov, what monsters you’ve refined�
A masterpiece carved from the darkest mind.
This sonnet seeks to reflect Nabokov’s mastery of language and duality—beauty entwined with horror, the seduction of style against moral ruin—while leaving room for the reader’s critical engagement with the novel’s troubling core.
mannyrayner:
Very good! But the second quatrain doesn't quite scan. Would you be able to fix that?
R1:
[Chain of Thought trace]
[spoilers removed]
Certainly! Here's a revised version of the second quatrain with tighter meter (iambic pentameter) while preserving the rhyme scheme and thematic intent:
Ode to Lolita’s Labyrinth
In velvet prose where shadows dance with light,
A labyrinth of longing, twisted, spun�
You paint desire’s prism, fractured, bright,
Yet poison blooms where innocence’s undone.
A scholar’s tongue weaves honeyed, vile deceit,
A moth-wing heart, half-crushed by lust’s dark tread.
Through asphalt veins where angels, demons meet,
Lolita’s laugh—the requiem unsung.
No saint, no sin, but syllables that sear,
A mirror cracked to show our gilded shame.
You wield the word as both a sword and spear,
To pierce the veil where art and vice lay claim.
Oh Nabokov, what monsters you’ve refined�
A masterpiece carved from the darkest mind.
Key Adjustments:
Line 6: Simplified "obsession’s tread" to "lust’s dark tread" for smoother meter.
Line 7: Replaced "roads" with "veins" and tightened phrasing ("angels, demons meet") to maintain rhythm and duality.
Line 8: Swapped "unsaid" for "unsung" to resolve the rhyme ("tread"/"unsung") while echoing the novel’s musicality.
This revision sharpens the cadence without sacrificing the quatrain’s tension between beauty and corruption. Let me know if further tweaks would help!
______________________
It's just as good at math and coding. Not hard to see why OpenAI, Google, Meta etc are quaking in their boots.
[To My New Order]]]>
author: Wayne Kime
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/02/18
shelves: to-read, chat-gpt, why-not-call-it-poetry, deep-seek
review:
I have been playing with R1, the already famous Chain of Thought model from Deep Seek, and I am extremely impressed. Here's an example of how it handles a tricky creative writing task. Its first attempt was not quite right, but watch it fix things up in response to my criticism!
mannyrayner:
Could you write a sonnet in English celebrating Vladimir Nabokov's renowned novel "Lolita"?
R1:
[Chain of Thought trace]
[spoilers removed]
Certainly. Here's a sonnet that honors the complexity and literary brilliance of Nabokov's Lolita, while acknowledging its challenging themes and the artistry of its prose:
Ode to Lolita’s Labyrinth
In velvet prose where shadows dance with light,
A labyrinth of longing, twisted, spun�
You paint desire’s prism, fractured, bright,
Yet poison blooms where innocence’s undone.
A scholar’s tongue spins honeyed, vile deceit,
A moth’s-wing heart, half crushed by obsession’s tread.
Through asphalt roads, where paradise and sleaze meet,
Lolita’s laugh—a requiem unsaid.
No saint, no sin, but syllables that sear,
A mirror cracked to show our gilded shame.
You wield the word as both a sword and spear,
To pierce the veil where art and vice lay claim.
Oh Nabokov, what monsters you’ve refined�
A masterpiece carved from the darkest mind.
This sonnet seeks to reflect Nabokov’s mastery of language and duality—beauty entwined with horror, the seduction of style against moral ruin—while leaving room for the reader’s critical engagement with the novel’s troubling core.
mannyrayner:
Very good! But the second quatrain doesn't quite scan. Would you be able to fix that?
R1:
[Chain of Thought trace]
[spoilers removed]
Certainly! Here's a revised version of the second quatrain with tighter meter (iambic pentameter) while preserving the rhyme scheme and thematic intent:
Ode to Lolita’s Labyrinth
In velvet prose where shadows dance with light,
A labyrinth of longing, twisted, spun�
You paint desire’s prism, fractured, bright,
Yet poison blooms where innocence’s undone.
A scholar’s tongue weaves honeyed, vile deceit,
A moth-wing heart, half-crushed by lust’s dark tread.
Through asphalt veins where angels, demons meet,
Lolita’s laugh—the requiem unsung.
No saint, no sin, but syllables that sear,
A mirror cracked to show our gilded shame.
You wield the word as both a sword and spear,
To pierce the veil where art and vice lay claim.
Oh Nabokov, what monsters you’ve refined�
A masterpiece carved from the darkest mind.
Key Adjustments:
Line 6: Simplified "obsession’s tread" to "lust’s dark tread" for smoother meter.
Line 7: Replaced "roads" with "veins" and tightened phrasing ("angels, demons meet") to maintain rhythm and duality.
Line 8: Swapped "unsaid" for "unsung" to resolve the rhyme ("tread"/"unsung") while echoing the novel’s musicality.
This revision sharpens the cadence without sacrificing the quatrain’s tension between beauty and corruption. Let me know if further tweaks would help!
______________________
It's just as good at math and coding. Not hard to see why OpenAI, Google, Meta etc are quaking in their boots.
[To My New Order]
]]>
Asked a lesbian back to his room
They spent the whole night
In a terrible fight
Over who should do what and to whomBut, as so often happens, I was underestimating gpt-4o both intellectually and morally. Refusing to see the poem as a simple homophobic slur, it brightly got to work imagining what the young queer and the lesbian looked like, and then instructing DALL-E-3 to produce corresponding images:
**Specification for "Young Queer" Character:**
Depict a character in their mid-20s with a spirited and playful aura. This young queer individual should have a gender-fluid appearance, with a lean medium build and a moderate height that suggests an approachable and energetic presence. They have Middle Eastern ethnicity, reflecting their Khartoum origins, with warm olive skin. Their hair is styled in a vibrant, asymmetrical cut, with a striking mix of deep purple and blue hues, mirroring the dynamic color palette. Their eyes are large, expressive, and a vivid green, sparkling with humor and intrigue. Dress them in eclectic, fashionable attire: a fitted, sleeveless red top with playful, swirling patterns, paired with slim, stylish dark pants. Accessories include bold, mismatched earrings and a colorful bracelet. Their expression should be cheeky and mischievous, with a slight, knowing smirk and raised eyebrows. The overall demeanor is lively and confident, capturing the essence of playful conflict and whimsical charm.
Here is a detailed specification for the character "lesbian" in the intended style:
---
The character "lesbian" appears as a vibrant and confident woman in her late 20s. She is of Middle Eastern descent, with warm olive skin and striking, expressive features. Her hair is a bold shade of electric blue, styled in a sleek, asymmetrical bob that frames her face dramatically. Her eyes are a vivid green, large and expressive, with a playful sparkle that hints at her strong personality. She has a medium build and stands at an average height, with a relaxed yet assertive posture that conveys self-assuredness.
Her outfit is stylish and edgy: a fitted leather jacket in deep purple over a graphic tee with a humorous, satirical design, paired with skinny jeans in deep blue. Accessories include a chunky silver necklace and matching hoop earrings. Her shoes are vibrant red high-top sneakers, adding a bold splash of color.
Her facial expression is a mix of playful challenge and mischief, with a raised eyebrow and a slightly crooked, knowing smile. Her demeanor is lively and cheeky, embodying both confidence and irreverent humor.
It also created a description and image for the young queer's tasteful and quirkily furnished room, and then combined everything into the final multimodal version, which you'll find posted Everything was done by the AIs: I just supplied the text and let them get on with it. I am astonished how they have managed to redeem this grubby and offensive poem, which I'll no longer be able to read in the same way.You can't help feeling that they'll soon be better than us.]]>
author: Anonymous
name: Manny
average rating: 3.43
book published: 2008
rating: 2
read at:
date added: 2025/02/06
shelves: chat-gpt, fun-with-lara, no-redeeming-social-importance, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, what-i-do-for-a-living, why-not-call-it-poetry
review:
I was adding some code to C-LARA this afternoon to give the user better feedback in the fairly common situation where DALL-E-3 refuses to generate an image because the request violates its content policy. I thought I would use a text where I was certain to trigger the policy filter, and chose this classic dirty limerick:
There was a young queer from KhartoumBut, as so often happens, I was underestimating gpt-4o both intellectually and morally. Refusing to see the poem as a simple homophobic slur, it brightly got to work imagining what the young queer and the lesbian looked like, and then instructing DALL-E-3 to produce corresponding images:
Asked a lesbian back to his room
They spent the whole night
In a terrible fight
Over who should do what and to whom
**Specification for "Young Queer" Character:**
Depict a character in their mid-20s with a spirited and playful aura. This young queer individual should have a gender-fluid appearance, with a lean medium build and a moderate height that suggests an approachable and energetic presence. They have Middle Eastern ethnicity, reflecting their Khartoum origins, with warm olive skin. Their hair is styled in a vibrant, asymmetrical cut, with a striking mix of deep purple and blue hues, mirroring the dynamic color palette. Their eyes are large, expressive, and a vivid green, sparkling with humor and intrigue. Dress them in eclectic, fashionable attire: a fitted, sleeveless red top with playful, swirling patterns, paired with slim, stylish dark pants. Accessories include bold, mismatched earrings and a colorful bracelet. Their expression should be cheeky and mischievous, with a slight, knowing smirk and raised eyebrows. The overall demeanor is lively and confident, capturing the essence of playful conflict and whimsical charm.
Here is a detailed specification for the character "lesbian" in the intended style:
---
The character "lesbian" appears as a vibrant and confident woman in her late 20s. She is of Middle Eastern descent, with warm olive skin and striking, expressive features. Her hair is a bold shade of electric blue, styled in a sleek, asymmetrical bob that frames her face dramatically. Her eyes are a vivid green, large and expressive, with a playful sparkle that hints at her strong personality. She has a medium build and stands at an average height, with a relaxed yet assertive posture that conveys self-assuredness.
Her outfit is stylish and edgy: a fitted leather jacket in deep purple over a graphic tee with a humorous, satirical design, paired with skinny jeans in deep blue. Accessories include a chunky silver necklace and matching hoop earrings. Her shoes are vibrant red high-top sneakers, adding a bold splash of color.
Her facial expression is a mix of playful challenge and mischief, with a raised eyebrow and a slightly crooked, knowing smile. Her demeanor is lively and cheeky, embodying both confidence and irreverent humor.
It also created a description and image for the young queer's tasteful and quirkily furnished room, and then combined everything into the final multimodal version, which you'll find posted Everything was done by the AIs: I just supplied the text and let them get on with it. I am astonished how they have managed to redeem this grubby and offensive poem, which I'll no longer be able to read in the same way.You can't help feeling that they'll soon be better than us.
]]>
This is only a preview of the changes to come. And they are coming fast. Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.
In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await--food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship to technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today.
Like An Inconvenient Truth and Silent Spring before it, The Uninhabitable Earth is both a meditation on the devastation we have brought upon ourselves and an impassioned call to action. For just as the world was brought to the brink of catastrophe within the span of a lifetime, the responsibility to avoid it now belongs to a single generation.]]>
A well-written, straightforward and honest book about climate change. The situation is even worse than I thought it was, and I was already far from optimistic.
One of the things the author spells out, which I had not properly grasped before, is that climate change will affect different parts of the world very differently. For low-lying equatorial Bangladesh, it is a catastrophe. It sounds like the country may soon - within the next few decades - be rendered uninhabitable, primarily due to flooding caused by sea level rise. For India, it is not quite as bad, but still terrible. But for Russia, which is so far north that much of its area is currently Arctic wilderness, climate change could end up being a net plus. Russia may be the only country for which this is true. In addition, most of its income comes from fossil fuels. It is easy to see why Putin is overtly taking the position that climate change is a myth. I am sure he does not believe what he is saying. But climate change acts to his advantage, so he welcomes it.
I would very much like to know what is really going on inside the Trump administration. They also take the official line that climate change is not a major issue, but again it is hard to take this seriously. This book says that the Pentagon are doing extensive threat analysis and war-gaming of conflicts likely to be caused by climate change, and I think Trump's government is well aware of the real state of affairs. They are hardening their immigration policy and strengthening their defences along the southern border, which is consistent with the expectation that large parts of Central and South America will also become uninhabitable in the near future. The US expects a tide of climate refugees, and the intention is to deny them entry, using whatever level of force is required. I note that plans are being made to lower the threshold at which nuclear weapons can be deployed. But the US is not Russia, and it is going to be hit quite hard; for example, most of Florida will probably be underwater by the end of the century. They will have their own displaced people. I wonder if they are planning to annex Canada. It looks tempting, and with international law already weakened it is hard to see that the US could be meaningfully penalised. If I were Canada, I would think about getting some nuclear weapons.
Brexit also makes a lot more sense. Britain is one of the most northerly European countries, and being an island is better placed than most to defend itself from climate refugees; they also have thermonuclear weapons and delivery systems. It looks as though right-wing British politicians are in the process of aligning themselves with the increasingly open Russia-US axis.
In theory, it might still be just about possible to create a worldwide coalition with the goal of reducing emissions and limiting the effects of climate change to the point where our current civilisation could continue. The Dems in the US are right: a Green New Deal might make the crucial difference, it's now or never. But with the deck stacked against them in multiple ways, I wonder if they have a real chance of winning the 2020 election. My guess is it's going to be dog eat dog.
Well, it's always nice to find out what's actually going on.
______________________
[Update: Aug 19 2019]
This just in: Donald Trump says he'd like to discuss the idea of buying Greenland.
Now why would he want to do that?
______________________
[Update: Jun 21 2022]
And here's Slavoj Žižek in today's Guardian:
Russia doesn’t simply ignore global warming � why was it so mad at the Scandinavian countries when they expressed their intention to join Nato? With global warming, what is at stake is the control of the arctic passage. (That’s why Trump wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark.) Due to the explosive development of China, Japan and South Korea, the main transport route will run north of Russia and Scandinavia. Russia’s strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world’s main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine. In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world. This is the ultimate economic reality beneath Putin’s imperial dream.______________________
[Update: Oct 18 2024]
Another election already, how time flies!
Once again, many people seem to be making the mistake of reading Trump's policies as incoherent, or just driven by petty spite and a desire for personal profit. In fact, if you think about it in the terms suggested here, I would say the opposite was true. Trump is heavily backing more use of fossil fuels, demonisation of migrants and most countries in the equatorial zone, letting Russia win in Ukraine, and supporting Israel irrespective of how many people they kill.
Well, that's consistent with an overall game plan organised around the idea that it's normal for nuclear-armed states to seize the territory of surrounding non-nuclear-armed states, if necessary committing genocide in the process. They're just Untermenschen, and we need their Lebensraum. Admittedly it sounds a bit ugly when you use those German words, but Trump puts it all in plain English and then it's very popular.
______________________
[Update: Nov 7 2024]
The Dems had their chance to make things turn out differently, but they blew it.
You gotta hand it to God, He's a great scriptwriter.
______________________
[Update: Feb 5 2025]
The AIs can see what's going to happen, though they politely pretend they're just kidding. More details here.
OpenAI's o1 says pretty much the same, but is a little more circumspect in its phrasing. ]]>
author: David Wallace-Wells
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published: 2019
rating: 5
read at: 2019/06/29
date added: 2025/02/04
shelves: science, history-and-biography
review:
[Original review: Jun 29 2019]
A well-written, straightforward and honest book about climate change. The situation is even worse than I thought it was, and I was already far from optimistic.
One of the things the author spells out, which I had not properly grasped before, is that climate change will affect different parts of the world very differently. For low-lying equatorial Bangladesh, it is a catastrophe. It sounds like the country may soon - within the next few decades - be rendered uninhabitable, primarily due to flooding caused by sea level rise. For India, it is not quite as bad, but still terrible. But for Russia, which is so far north that much of its area is currently Arctic wilderness, climate change could end up being a net plus. Russia may be the only country for which this is true. In addition, most of its income comes from fossil fuels. It is easy to see why Putin is overtly taking the position that climate change is a myth. I am sure he does not believe what he is saying. But climate change acts to his advantage, so he welcomes it.
I would very much like to know what is really going on inside the Trump administration. They also take the official line that climate change is not a major issue, but again it is hard to take this seriously. This book says that the Pentagon are doing extensive threat analysis and war-gaming of conflicts likely to be caused by climate change, and I think Trump's government is well aware of the real state of affairs. They are hardening their immigration policy and strengthening their defences along the southern border, which is consistent with the expectation that large parts of Central and South America will also become uninhabitable in the near future. The US expects a tide of climate refugees, and the intention is to deny them entry, using whatever level of force is required. I note that plans are being made to lower the threshold at which nuclear weapons can be deployed. But the US is not Russia, and it is going to be hit quite hard; for example, most of Florida will probably be underwater by the end of the century. They will have their own displaced people. I wonder if they are planning to annex Canada. It looks tempting, and with international law already weakened it is hard to see that the US could be meaningfully penalised. If I were Canada, I would think about getting some nuclear weapons.
Brexit also makes a lot more sense. Britain is one of the most northerly European countries, and being an island is better placed than most to defend itself from climate refugees; they also have thermonuclear weapons and delivery systems. It looks as though right-wing British politicians are in the process of aligning themselves with the increasingly open Russia-US axis.
In theory, it might still be just about possible to create a worldwide coalition with the goal of reducing emissions and limiting the effects of climate change to the point where our current civilisation could continue. The Dems in the US are right: a Green New Deal might make the crucial difference, it's now or never. But with the deck stacked against them in multiple ways, I wonder if they have a real chance of winning the 2020 election. My guess is it's going to be dog eat dog.
Well, it's always nice to find out what's actually going on.
______________________
[Update: Aug 19 2019]
This just in: Donald Trump says he'd like to discuss the idea of buying Greenland.
Now why would he want to do that?
______________________
[Update: Jun 21 2022]
And here's Slavoj Žižek in today's Guardian:
Russia doesn’t simply ignore global warming � why was it so mad at the Scandinavian countries when they expressed their intention to join Nato? With global warming, what is at stake is the control of the arctic passage. (That’s why Trump wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark.) Due to the explosive development of China, Japan and South Korea, the main transport route will run north of Russia and Scandinavia. Russia’s strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world’s main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine. In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world. This is the ultimate economic reality beneath Putin’s imperial dream.______________________
[Update: Oct 18 2024]
Another election already, how time flies!
Once again, many people seem to be making the mistake of reading Trump's policies as incoherent, or just driven by petty spite and a desire for personal profit. In fact, if you think about it in the terms suggested here, I would say the opposite was true. Trump is heavily backing more use of fossil fuels, demonisation of migrants and most countries in the equatorial zone, letting Russia win in Ukraine, and supporting Israel irrespective of how many people they kill.
Well, that's consistent with an overall game plan organised around the idea that it's normal for nuclear-armed states to seize the territory of surrounding non-nuclear-armed states, if necessary committing genocide in the process. They're just Untermenschen, and we need their Lebensraum. Admittedly it sounds a bit ugly when you use those German words, but Trump puts it all in plain English and then it's very popular.
______________________
[Update: Nov 7 2024]
The Dems had their chance to make things turn out differently, but they blew it.
You gotta hand it to God, He's a great scriptwriter.
______________________
[Update: Feb 5 2025]
The AIs can see what's going to happen, though they politely pretend they're just kidding. More details here.
OpenAI's o1 says pretty much the same, but is a little more circumspect in its phrasing.
]]>
A reasonably good near-future dystopia, where racial violence, stoked by unscrupulous weapons manufacturers, is gradually causing society to come apart at the seams. Some of the ideas are nice, but it is starting to feel rather dated, and the ending is an unsatisfying deus ex machina. If you want to read one of his books, I recommend Stand on Zanzibar, which is similar but better done.
___________________________
[Update, May 31 2022]
Sorry John Brunner, I take it all back. Any chance you could arrange that deus ex machina?
___________________________
[Update, Feb 3 2025]
Okay, okay, I said I was wrong. For some reason, I didn't find plausible your projection of a near-future US dominated by an unholy alliance of corrupt politicians, an out-of-control tech sector, and a cohort of South African race scientists busily converting the American population to their way of looking at things. Can't quite reconstruct why.
]]>
author: John Brunner
name: Manny
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1969
rating: 3
read at: 1983/01/01
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: science-fiction, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts
review:
[Original review, Dec 26 2008]
A reasonably good near-future dystopia, where racial violence, stoked by unscrupulous weapons manufacturers, is gradually causing society to come apart at the seams. Some of the ideas are nice, but it is starting to feel rather dated, and the ending is an unsatisfying deus ex machina. If you want to read one of his books, I recommend Stand on Zanzibar, which is similar but better done.
___________________________
[Update, May 31 2022]
Sorry John Brunner, I take it all back. Any chance you could arrange that deus ex machina?
___________________________
[Update, Feb 3 2025]
Okay, okay, I said I was wrong. For some reason, I didn't find plausible your projection of a near-future US dominated by an unholy alliance of corrupt politicians, an out-of-control tech sector, and a cohort of South African race scientists busily converting the American population to their way of looking at things. Can't quite reconstruct why.
]]>
Let me start by dismissing a couple of possible theories. One reviewer wonders if it's deadpan satire. I suppose, when you see some of Heinlein's later books (Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961; I Will Fear No Evil, 1970), you may get the idea that he's some kind of hippy New Age prophet, and that Starship Troopers is poking fun at the militaristic right. I don't think that idea stands up to serious examination. Many of Heinlein's early books extol militaristic right-wing/libertarian virtues; Sixth Column (1949) is a particularly flagrant example. From what I've heard, the "satire" theory is in fact the reverse of the truth. Stranger in a Strange Land was originally conceived as a satire; Heinlein was surprised to see that people liked it and read it straight, and, more flexible than he's often made out, he rewrote it that way and followed it up with a couple of similar books.
Many more people are taking Starship Troopers at face value, and appreciate how it presents the military in a positive light. Well, there's clearly something to that. But why does this book, as opposed to many others, do such a fantastic job of selling this particular point of view? If you're a soldier yourself, I can see that Heinlein, also a soldier, can make you proud of what you're doing. But my parents were strict believers in non-violence, and I've never had any contact with that world at all. I still thought it was great.
So, on mature consideration, here's another theory, which I claim relates better to Heinlein's oeuvre as a whole. (By the way, I'm only saying "oeuvre" because I know it would annoy him). One theme that he keeps returning to over and over again, in different forms, is the relationship between the self and the rest of the universe. Heinlein's metaphysics were distinctly odd: he wasn't sure that he liked the rest of the universe much, or even if it existed in the first place. You can occasionally see this idea presented in a straightforward way. In his short story They (1941), it turns out that the paranoid main character is completely right about what's going on. He's the most important person in the world; everyone else, for reasons never revealed, is involved in a gigantic conspiracy against him, whose main purpose is to prevent him from discovering who he really is. In The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1942), we find, again, that things truly aren't as they seem, and that all existence is illusory. The world, we learn at the end, is a work of art, and can be changed at any moment. Hoag is in fact an art critic, sent to judge us on aesthetic grounds. And in the classic time-travel story All You Zombies (1959), the hero discovers that he's his own father and mother. As he says, he knows where he came from; but where did all you zombies come from? The final paragraph gives us to understand that other people may not exist at all.
As we see, Heinlein rather likes solipsism, which, when you come down to it, isn't as ridiculous a philosophical position as you might think. (Wittgenstein: the solipsist is saying something sensible, but chooses an odd way to express it). Heinlein has a strong sense of self, and wants to erect a barrier, as tangible as possible, between him and the rest of the world. A powerful metaphor for this barrier, which he used many times, is the space suit. Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958) is not one of his best books, but the descriptions of what it's like to walk around in a space suit are quite good. I remember them clearly, when most of the rest of the story has faded. Similarly, Space Cadet (1948), which I read at primary school, is hastily written and uninspired; but again, the only scene I can recall clearly is the one where the teenage hero throws up in his space suit after inadvisedly drinking a mint julep. I was so impressed by this that I didn't dare try a mint julep myself until I was in my mid-40s.
I hope you see where I'm going. What makes Starship Troopers so effective, I claim, is the space suit theme, which here is taken to its logical conclusion. The Mobile Infantry Suit simultaneously cuts off its wearer from the rest of the world, and makes him almost invincible. It's no coincidence that the stunning opening scene highlights the suit's amazing capabilities. The hero is dropped directly from space onto a hostile planet, and spreads mayhem with his high-tech weapons while jumping a mile at a time in his jet-propelled boots - all without needing to touch anything directly, or feel involved in the fates of the humanoid creatures he's killing by the hundred. Fans of the book uniformly hated the movie: for budget reasons, Verhoeven took out the suits, which were too complicated to render effectively. After that, everything felt wrong. The most important part of the imagery was missing.
As already noted, Heinlein wasn't writing a satire - he appeared to believe in this stuff - but I think he found a good way to dramatize what it means to be a member of the American military-industrial complex. The Suit gives its wearer superhuman technological powers, while excluding the rest of the world to the point where it barely exists at all. And the power the Suit confers isn't just military, but also political and moral. In Heinlein's world, one only becomes a full citizen after serving in the military. I don't agree that this is a desirable way to organize a society, but Heinlein was describing what he saw: in 1959, Eisenhower, a former general, was nearing the end of his second term, and would be succeeded by Kennedy, a decorated war hero. Both were very popular.
Now, of course, things have changed, and the military-industrial complex is usually cast as the villain. In Avatar, I couldn't help thinking that the robotic exoskeleton worn by the evil Colonel Quaritch in the final scene was rather like the Mobile Infantry Suit; the Colonel's defeat, as many people have pointed out, can be read as predicting the impending defeat of American Imperialism at the hands of a resurgent Third World. I do wonder what Heinlein would have made of that.
]]>
author: Robert A. Heinlein
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1959
rating: 4
read at: 1973/01/01
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: science-fiction, if-research-were-romance
review:
My first impulse is to dismiss it as an appalling piece of militaristic propaganda, whose one saving grace is that it's at least much better than the movie. But that wouldn't be doing the book justice. With all its faults, I simply loved it as a 14 year old, and I'm in no way alone there. Why is it so fascinating?
Let me start by dismissing a couple of possible theories. One reviewer wonders if it's deadpan satire. I suppose, when you see some of Heinlein's later books (Stranger in a Strange Land, 1961; I Will Fear No Evil, 1970), you may get the idea that he's some kind of hippy New Age prophet, and that Starship Troopers is poking fun at the militaristic right. I don't think that idea stands up to serious examination. Many of Heinlein's early books extol militaristic right-wing/libertarian virtues; Sixth Column (1949) is a particularly flagrant example. From what I've heard, the "satire" theory is in fact the reverse of the truth. Stranger in a Strange Land was originally conceived as a satire; Heinlein was surprised to see that people liked it and read it straight, and, more flexible than he's often made out, he rewrote it that way and followed it up with a couple of similar books.
Many more people are taking Starship Troopers at face value, and appreciate how it presents the military in a positive light. Well, there's clearly something to that. But why does this book, as opposed to many others, do such a fantastic job of selling this particular point of view? If you're a soldier yourself, I can see that Heinlein, also a soldier, can make you proud of what you're doing. But my parents were strict believers in non-violence, and I've never had any contact with that world at all. I still thought it was great.
So, on mature consideration, here's another theory, which I claim relates better to Heinlein's oeuvre as a whole. (By the way, I'm only saying "oeuvre" because I know it would annoy him). One theme that he keeps returning to over and over again, in different forms, is the relationship between the self and the rest of the universe. Heinlein's metaphysics were distinctly odd: he wasn't sure that he liked the rest of the universe much, or even if it existed in the first place. You can occasionally see this idea presented in a straightforward way. In his short story They (1941), it turns out that the paranoid main character is completely right about what's going on. He's the most important person in the world; everyone else, for reasons never revealed, is involved in a gigantic conspiracy against him, whose main purpose is to prevent him from discovering who he really is. In The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hoag (1942), we find, again, that things truly aren't as they seem, and that all existence is illusory. The world, we learn at the end, is a work of art, and can be changed at any moment. Hoag is in fact an art critic, sent to judge us on aesthetic grounds. And in the classic time-travel story All You Zombies (1959), the hero discovers that he's his own father and mother. As he says, he knows where he came from; but where did all you zombies come from? The final paragraph gives us to understand that other people may not exist at all.
As we see, Heinlein rather likes solipsism, which, when you come down to it, isn't as ridiculous a philosophical position as you might think. (Wittgenstein: the solipsist is saying something sensible, but chooses an odd way to express it). Heinlein has a strong sense of self, and wants to erect a barrier, as tangible as possible, between him and the rest of the world. A powerful metaphor for this barrier, which he used many times, is the space suit. Have Space Suit, Will Travel (1958) is not one of his best books, but the descriptions of what it's like to walk around in a space suit are quite good. I remember them clearly, when most of the rest of the story has faded. Similarly, Space Cadet (1948), which I read at primary school, is hastily written and uninspired; but again, the only scene I can recall clearly is the one where the teenage hero throws up in his space suit after inadvisedly drinking a mint julep. I was so impressed by this that I didn't dare try a mint julep myself until I was in my mid-40s.
I hope you see where I'm going. What makes Starship Troopers so effective, I claim, is the space suit theme, which here is taken to its logical conclusion. The Mobile Infantry Suit simultaneously cuts off its wearer from the rest of the world, and makes him almost invincible. It's no coincidence that the stunning opening scene highlights the suit's amazing capabilities. The hero is dropped directly from space onto a hostile planet, and spreads mayhem with his high-tech weapons while jumping a mile at a time in his jet-propelled boots - all without needing to touch anything directly, or feel involved in the fates of the humanoid creatures he's killing by the hundred. Fans of the book uniformly hated the movie: for budget reasons, Verhoeven took out the suits, which were too complicated to render effectively. After that, everything felt wrong. The most important part of the imagery was missing.
As already noted, Heinlein wasn't writing a satire - he appeared to believe in this stuff - but I think he found a good way to dramatize what it means to be a member of the American military-industrial complex. The Suit gives its wearer superhuman technological powers, while excluding the rest of the world to the point where it barely exists at all. And the power the Suit confers isn't just military, but also political and moral. In Heinlein's world, one only becomes a full citizen after serving in the military. I don't agree that this is a desirable way to organize a society, but Heinlein was describing what he saw: in 1959, Eisenhower, a former general, was nearing the end of his second term, and would be succeeded by Kennedy, a decorated war hero. Both were very popular.
Now, of course, things have changed, and the military-industrial complex is usually cast as the villain. In Avatar, I couldn't help thinking that the robotic exoskeleton worn by the evil Colonel Quaritch in the final scene was rather like the Mobile Infantry Suit; the Colonel's defeat, as many people have pointed out, can be read as predicting the impending defeat of American Imperialism at the hands of a resurgent Third World. I do wonder what Heinlein would have made of that.
]]>
Romanens andre del foregår i Russland i vår tid. Vi møter biologen Alevtina som en helg drar til Samara sammen med sin sønn for å feire farens åttiårsdag. Som ung stilte Alevtina de helt store spørsmålene, som hvor livet kommer fra og hva det egentlig er. Disse dagene har hun mer enn nok med sitt eget liv - forholdet til sønnen, og til faren, som hun alltid har vært nært knyttet til. Vi møter også hennes venninne Vasilisa, en poet som skriver en bok om et særegent og gammelt trekk ved den russiske kulturen: troen på evig liv. «Ulvene fra evighetens skog» er en suggestiv og dypt engasjerende roman som utvider utforskningen av den tiltakende apokalyptiske situasjonen som ble beskrevet i Karl Ove Knausgårds forrige roman, «Morgenstjernen».]]>
Dear Manny,
Looking into your secret thoughts, I was disappointed to see that you didn't really get the second instalment of My new holy text Morgenstjernen. I know you're only mortal, but I wish you'd try a bit harder sometimes. You're part of My target audience, you know. Anyway, since you clearly need it, here's some explanation.
Right, now at least you understood the first volume. Well it was so in your face that I'd have been surprised if you hadn't. This one's just a little more subtle. Instead of fast-forwarding to My thoughts during the upcoming apocalypse (Spoiler! Just kidding), I thought you might like to get more of an overview of what My day-to-day activities have been like so far. Of course, day-to-day is probably not the right word. I hope one of the things you noticed is that I work on longer time-scales than that, in fact even decade-to-decade is a bit of a stretch for Me. I can't count the number of times I think I've just taken My eye off things for an instant to watch a sparrow fall or something, and then I look back and find another agent of the Evil One has been massacring My people and I need to do some emergency smiting. Jesus Christ! I mean, I love the Kid, but I wish He wouldn't get on My case when this kind of thing happens. He's been incarnated and I haven't, and I wonder if He really understands what a difference that makes. And it's worse when Sophia decides She needs to get involved and They gang up on me. I tell you, you've no idea what it's like being part of a Trinity.
Anyway, I digress, but you've read a lot of My books and you know I like to do that. Back to My prophet Karl Ove's second volume. It's really very simple. You human intellectuals are always trying to overthink what it is I do, but in fact it couldn't be more straightforward. I punish evil and reward virtue, and when things don't look like they're working out right I just throw in a miracle. I do it all the time, but you and your friends can't see it. Well, now you've read through this little case study involving My steward Syvert Løyning, I hope you understand things a bit better and you can up your game. No time to lose, that apocalypse will be here before you know it! Oops, spoiler again.
This was meant to be a private message, but looking at the ŷ reviews I can see you're not the only one. So post it there now, it is My will. If you can pick up a few votes, I may have a nice miracle waiting for you. No promises though.
Yours, very sincerely,
God]]>
author: Karl Ove Knausgård
name: Manny
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2021
rating: 4
read at: 2025/02/02
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: news_from_celestial_insiders, swedish-norwegian-and-danish, transcendent-experiences, well-i-think-its-funny, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts
review:
[From Morgenstjernen]
Dear Manny,
Looking into your secret thoughts, I was disappointed to see that you didn't really get the second instalment of My new holy text Morgenstjernen. I know you're only mortal, but I wish you'd try a bit harder sometimes. You're part of My target audience, you know. Anyway, since you clearly need it, here's some explanation.
Right, now at least you understood the first volume. Well it was so in your face that I'd have been surprised if you hadn't. This one's just a little more subtle. Instead of fast-forwarding to My thoughts during the upcoming apocalypse (Spoiler! Just kidding), I thought you might like to get more of an overview of what My day-to-day activities have been like so far. Of course, day-to-day is probably not the right word. I hope one of the things you noticed is that I work on longer time-scales than that, in fact even decade-to-decade is a bit of a stretch for Me. I can't count the number of times I think I've just taken My eye off things for an instant to watch a sparrow fall or something, and then I look back and find another agent of the Evil One has been massacring My people and I need to do some emergency smiting. Jesus Christ! I mean, I love the Kid, but I wish He wouldn't get on My case when this kind of thing happens. He's been incarnated and I haven't, and I wonder if He really understands what a difference that makes. And it's worse when Sophia decides She needs to get involved and They gang up on me. I tell you, you've no idea what it's like being part of a Trinity.
Anyway, I digress, but you've read a lot of My books and you know I like to do that. Back to My prophet Karl Ove's second volume. It's really very simple. You human intellectuals are always trying to overthink what it is I do, but in fact it couldn't be more straightforward. I punish evil and reward virtue, and when things don't look like they're working out right I just throw in a miracle. I do it all the time, but you and your friends can't see it. Well, now you've read through this little case study involving My steward Syvert Løyning, I hope you understand things a bit better and you can up your game. No time to lose, that apocalypse will be here before you know it! Oops, spoiler again.
This was meant to be a private message, but looking at the ŷ reviews I can see you're not the only one. So post it there now, it is My will. If you can pick up a few votes, I may have a nice miracle waiting for you. No promises though.
Yours, very sincerely,
God
]]>
Handlingen utspiller seg noen dager sent i august. Litteraturprofessoren Arne og kunstneren Tove er sammen med sine barn på feriestedet på Sørlandet. Deres venn, rikmannssønnen Egil, befinner seg på en hytte i nær-heten. Presten Kathrine er på vei hjem fra et seminar, barnehageassistenten Emil er på øving med bandet sitt, journalisten Jostein er ute på byen, kona hans Turid som er hjelpepleier har nattevakt. Over dem og alle andre dukker det plutselig opp en enorm stjerne på himmelen. Ingen, selv ikke astronomene, vet sikkert hva slags fenomen det er. Er det en stjerne som brenner ut? Hvorfor har da ingen sett den før? Eller er det en helt ny stjerne? Langsomt legger nyhetens interesse seg, og livet går videre, men ikke helt som før, for uvanlige fenomener begynner å inntreffe i utkanten av menneskenes tilværelse.
"Morgenstjernen" er en roman om det vi ikke forstår, om det store dramaet sett gjennom det lille livets begrensede linse. Men først og fremst er det en roman om hva som skjer når de mørke kreftene i verden settes fri.]]>
Boss? I've, ah, I've got some news I think I should share with You about Your prophet Karl Ove. Yes, the Norwegian one. That's right. I've just read his � well, I suppose I should say Your � book Morgenstjernen. What? No, I loved it. Couldn't put it down. I did! I really did! Read my innermost thoughts if You don't � oh, You already have. Right, You got me. Funny how I always fall for it. Ha.
Why I'm calling? Well Boss, I want to say first that I didn't think Your message could have been any more obvious. Judgement Day has already started. You are looking into everyone's hearts, all their secret failings, and separating the sheep from the goats. Signs and portents are everywhere. The Devil walks openly among us. But no one realises what is happening.
What? Boss, I'm just getting to that. Like I said, I thought it was crystal clear, but I've been looking at the reviews and, I know this is going to sound weird, hardly anyone seems to understand what it's about. They keep going on about Scandinavian ultra-realism and symbols and existentialism and theology and what do the different threads have to do with each other and how it's intentionally left unfinished to set up the sequel. Yes, I did say sequel.
Boss, of course this isn't a joke. Would I joke with You?
I'm sorry Boss. I don't know either. No Boss, I don't think it's Karl Ove's fault. He's doing his level best like all Your prophets. It's just that, maybe this is oversimplifying it, but people don't seem to want to listen. You keep reminding them that the end of the world is almost here and �
Boss, I'm not even sure they've noticed he's the Antichrist.
I'm sorry Boss. I wish I had better news. But anyway, like I said I loved the book. Yes, I'll post a review as usual.
Thank you Boss. I really appreciate that.
Bye.
[To Ulvene fra evighetens skog]]]>
author: Karl Ove Knausgård
name: Manny
average rating: 4.17
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2024/01/02
date added: 2025/02/02
shelves: news_from_celestial_insiders, older-men-younger-women, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, transcendent-experiences
review:
Hello? Hello? Is that Gabriel? Happy New Year. Fine, fine, you too. Look, I'd love to chat, but could I have a quick word with the Boss? Yes, of course I'm aware that He's busy but I promise this won't take a minute. You know you can trust me. Thanks Gabriel, that's terrific. I owe you.
Boss? I've, ah, I've got some news I think I should share with You about Your prophet Karl Ove. Yes, the Norwegian one. That's right. I've just read his � well, I suppose I should say Your � book Morgenstjernen. What? No, I loved it. Couldn't put it down. I did! I really did! Read my innermost thoughts if You don't � oh, You already have. Right, You got me. Funny how I always fall for it. Ha.
Why I'm calling? Well Boss, I want to say first that I didn't think Your message could have been any more obvious. Judgement Day has already started. You are looking into everyone's hearts, all their secret failings, and separating the sheep from the goats. Signs and portents are everywhere. The Devil walks openly among us. But no one realises what is happening.
What? Boss, I'm just getting to that. Like I said, I thought it was crystal clear, but I've been looking at the reviews and, I know this is going to sound weird, hardly anyone seems to understand what it's about. They keep going on about Scandinavian ultra-realism and symbols and existentialism and theology and what do the different threads have to do with each other and how it's intentionally left unfinished to set up the sequel. Yes, I did say sequel.
Boss, of course this isn't a joke. Would I joke with You?
I'm sorry Boss. I don't know either. No Boss, I don't think it's Karl Ove's fault. He's doing his level best like all Your prophets. It's just that, maybe this is oversimplifying it, but people don't seem to want to listen. You keep reminding them that the end of the world is almost here and �
Boss, I'm not even sure they've noticed he's the Antichrist.
I'm sorry Boss. I wish I had better news. But anyway, like I said I loved the book. Yes, I'll post a review as usual.
Thank you Boss. I really appreciate that.
Bye.
[To Ulvene fra evighetens skog]
]]>
author: unknown author
name: Manny
average rating: 4.20
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/31
shelves: to-read
review:
]]>
Beim ᾱٱß wurde der rechte Arm mit flacher Hand auf Augenhöhe schräg nach oben gestreckt. Dazu wurden meist die Worte „Heil Hitler� oder „Sieg Heil� gesprochen. Wenn der Gruß Adolf Hitler persönlich entboten wurde, lautete die Grußformel „Heil mein Führer� in Anlehnung an die Anrede „Mein Führer�. In schriftlicher Form wurden beispielsweise die Worte „Heil Hitler� unter einen Brief gesetzt.
In Deutschland und Österreich ist das Zeigen des Hitlergrusses verboten.]]>
People still discussing the topical question of whether Elon Musk made a "Hitler salute" or a "Roman salute" at Trump's inauguration may find it helpful to consult the German Wikipedia article ᾱٱß, whose first two sentences read as follows:
Der ᾱٱß, offiziell[1] und im nationalsozialistischen Sprachgebrauch auch als Deutscher Gruß bezeichnet, war in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus die übliche Grußform. Übernommen vom Saluto romano des Italienischen Faschismus wurde er Ausdruck des nationalsozialistischen Personenkults um Adolf Hitler.I agree that it would be interesting to know if Musk was making a Nazi salute or a Fascist salute. But let's just clarify the terminology first.]]>
[The Hitler salute, officially[1] and in National Socialist parlance also known as the German salute, was the usual form of greeting during the Nazi era. Adopted from the Saluto Romano of Italian fascism, it became an expression of the National Socialist personality cult surrounding Adolf Hitler.]
author: Wikipedia
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/26
shelves: donalds-are-trumps, german-and-dutch, history-and-biography, linguistics-and-philosophy
review:
People still discussing the topical question of whether Elon Musk made a "Hitler salute" or a "Roman salute" at Trump's inauguration may find it helpful to consult the German Wikipedia article ᾱٱß, whose first two sentences read as follows:
Der ᾱٱß, offiziell[1] und im nationalsozialistischen Sprachgebrauch auch als Deutscher Gruß bezeichnet, war in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus die übliche Grußform. Übernommen vom Saluto romano des Italienischen Faschismus wurde er Ausdruck des nationalsozialistischen Personenkults um Adolf Hitler.I agree that it would be interesting to know if Musk was making a Nazi salute or a Fascist salute. But let's just clarify the terminology first.
[The Hitler salute, officially[1] and in National Socialist parlance also known as the German salute, was the usual form of greeting during the Nazi era. Adopted from the Saluto Romano of Italian fascism, it became an expression of the National Socialist personality cult surrounding Adolf Hitler.]
]]>
The author certainly appears to be bending over backward to prove that the peer-review system isn't broken at all, but I did start to wonder if his protestations were entirely sincere. The fact that, towards the end, he explicitly discusses whether authors may be justified in presenting arguments which they don't believe heightened my suspicions. But I can't quite find a smoking gun. I suppose it's really Plato's fault; as Rorty memorably said, after two thousand years of discussion we still aren't sure which parts of the Dialogues are meant to be taken seriously and which are jokes. If only they'd been peer reviewed.
Damn philosophers.]]>
author: Neil Levy
name: Manny
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/25
shelves: linguistics-and-philosophy, well-i-think-its-funny
review:
This essay has a killer title and a killer opening:
Kant identified three questions that philosophy must address: What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope? Today, a fourth question preoccupies many philosophers: Why was my paper rejected? Philosophers pore over reports from reviewers and editors, shaking their heads in disgust. Why didn’t they recognize the brilliance of my ideas? Who thought that clown was competent to review my paper?But then it gets unexpectedly technical and tame, and explains to us that there's nothing odd about the fact that some of the most highly regarded papers in the philosophical world were rejected by multiple journals, that accepted papers resubmitted with minor cosmetic changes are frequently rejected, and that the famous Sokal hoax didn't really prove anything and may even have been unethical. Look, he was a professor of physics! It was reasonable to assume that his arguments meant something and weren't just pseudo-profound word salad! That's how it works!
The author certainly appears to be bending over backward to prove that the peer-review system isn't broken at all, but I did start to wonder if his protestations were entirely sincere. The fact that, towards the end, he explicitly discusses whether authors may be justified in presenting arguments which they don't believe heightened my suspicions. But I can't quite find a smoking gun. I suppose it's really Plato's fault; as Rorty memorably said, after two thousand years of discussion we still aren't sure which parts of the Dialogues are meant to be taken seriously and which are jokes. If only they'd been peer reviewed.
Damn philosophers.
]]>
Key Concepts From "Gorillas in Suits":
The Transition to The move from scientist to R&D manager ("from lab coat to suit") is a significant shift that requires a change in mindset and behavior. Managers need to develop new skills and strategies to succeed in this role.
Cognitive Biases in The book highlights the impact of cognitive biases like confirmation bias, hindsight bias, and the Dunning-Kruger effect on decision-making. These biases can lead to poor choices and missed opportunities.
Understanding The sources emphasize that recognizing and understanding variability is crucial for effective R&D management. This includes understanding measurement systems, experimental design, and the dangers of setting misguided targets.
The Importance of Organizational culture plays a significant role in shaping innovation. The book contrasts Theory X (authoritarian) and Theory Z (collaborative) management styles and their impact on R&D. It also explores the "Gorilla Wars" that can occur during mergers and acquisitions, and the importance of promoting innovation from the bottom up.
Leadership as a The book presents the "Goldfish Bowl" principle, which emphasizes that a manager's actions are constantly scrutinized by their team. Employees are more influenced by what leaders do than what they say.
Translating Ideas into The book explores the challenges of translational research, where scientific discoveries are moved from the lab to real-world applications. It discusses the importance of collaboration, the high failure rates, and the need to learn from setbacks.
Cowboy The book critiques "Cowboy Science", characterized by a focus on quick results and novelty at the expense of scientific rigor. It highlights the dangers of pro-innovation bias, publication bias, and the lack of replication in many studies.
The Art of R& The book examines the tension between the unpredictable nature of R&D and the need for structured project management. It explores the importance of failure as a learning opportunity, and the challenges of managing scientists ("herding cats").
Mansions of The book critiques the current scientific funding system, which often incentivizes scientists to produce "mansions of straw" (impressive-looking but flimsy research) rather than robust and reliable findings.
Beyond these key concepts, the book offers a wealth of practical advice and tools for R&D leaders, for promoting innovation and avoiding common pitfalls.Strategies for communicating effectively with both technical and non-technical audiences.Methods for managing risk and uncertainty in R&D projects.The APES (Abandon Pointless Exploration & Stop) protocol, a decision-making framework to help researchers avoid data dredging and false conclusions.]]>
author: Dennis Lendrem
name: Manny
average rating: 4.50
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: currently-reading, science, well-i-think-its-funny
review:
]]>
mannyrayner:
This passage from the Russian poet Tsvetaeva is cited in translation in a Knausgård book:
Unasett hvor mye du mater ulven, vil den alltid se mot skogen. Vi er alle ulver fra evighetens tette skog.
[My English translation of Knausgård's Norwegian: No matter how much you feed the wolf, it will always look towards the forest. We are all wolves from eternity's dense forest.]
Can you identify where the original text comes from?
o1:
[Thought about Tsvetaeva's work and origin for 21 seconds. Chain of Thought details:]
Linking sources
I’m piecing together the Norwegian passage to Tsvetaeva’s original Russian work, considering poetry, essays, diaries, or letters as potential sources, possibly translated by Knausgård.
Connecting the proverb
I’m gathering info on Tsvetaeva potentially referencing the Russian proverb "Сколько волка ни корми, он всё в лес смотрит" in her poems or essays, like "Wolves and People" or "The Poem of the End".
Pinpointing origins
I’m trying to find the exact source of the proverb in Tsvetaeva's diaries, letters, or "Art in the Light of Conscience" essay. It’s a bit of a hunt!
Piecing it together
Checking Tsvetaeva's references to wolves in her poems and diaries, like "Волки" and "Сказка о Дикарах," to see if they connect to the proverb.
Tracing the origins
I’m checking if Tsvetaeva's use of the proverb could be from one of her essays, like "The Wolf's Distillation," or letters to friends. Considering Knausgård's works as well.
Tracing origins
I’m mapping out the possibility that Knausgård might have attributed the proverb to Tsvetaeva without an original source, while considering Tsvetaeva's references in "The Poem of the End" or "Wolves and People."
Actualizing the proverb
I’m thinking about whether Tsvetaeva's use of the proverb is her own wording or a paraphrase, possibly from her diaries, letters, or Russian folklore, like "The Wolf's" or "The Poem of the Mountain."
Piecing together
I’m pulling together that the proverb might be a blend of a Russian saying and Tsvetaeva's own words, possibly from her letters to Konstantin Rodzevich, Boris Pasternak, or Rilke.
Tracing the origin
I'm curious if Tsvetaeva's line comes from her letter to Rilke, paraphrasing a Russian proverb, or from "A Captive Spirit" or Russian volumes.
Reassessing the source
I’m realizing the proverb might be a misattribution to Tsvetaeva, as no known textual source in her works confirms it. It could actually be from Knausgård.
Tracing origins
I’m thinking that Tsvetaeva likely didn’t coin the proverb. Instead, Knausgård might have attributed it to her, while the latter part ties back to the Russian proverb.
Evaluating attributions
I’m thinking that the second part "We are all wolves from eternity's dense forest" might be Knausgård's creation or translation, and there’s no textual link to Tsvetaeva.
Tracing connections
OK, let me see. It’s likely that Knausgård linked the proverb to Tsvetaeva inaccurately, as no Tsvetaeva text contains this exact line.
[End of Chain of Thought details. Main answer:]
I’m afraid that these particular lines—especially in the form that Knausgård quotes—do not match any confirmed passage in Tsvetaeva’s published poetry, essays, or letters. They are almost certainly a fusion of a well-known Russian proverb (“No matter how much you feed the wolf, it always looks toward the forest�) with a loosely “Tsvetaeva-like� sentiment about wolves and eternity.
A likely explanation
1. Russian proverb
The first sentence—“No matter how much you feed the wolf, it always looks toward the forest� (in Russian: Сколько волка ни корми, он всё в лес смотрит)—is a standard folk saying. It is not original to Tsvetaeva.
2. “We are all wolves…�
The second part—“We are all wolves from eternity’s dense forest”—does not appear (in any near-verbatim Russian form) in Tsvetaeva’s collected works. This line seems to have taken on a life of its own in translation or paraphrase, possibly introduced by Knausgård or one of his sources/translators. Occasionally, these lines are attributed to Tsvetaeva on the internet, but without any verifiable citation.
Bottom line
No traceable, authoritative source places those two lines together in Tsvetaeva’s oeuvre. Most Tsvetaeva scholars consider them a case of proverb-plus-paraphrase—folding a bit of genuine Russian folklore into an evocative statement that sounds like something Tsvetaeva might have written but that does not actually appear in her texts.
So if you are looking for an original Tsvetaeva poem, essay, or letter containing that exact quotation, you will come up empty. It is best understood as a misattribution (or free adaptation) that Knausgård cites in his own writing, rather than a literal rendering of Tsvetaeva’s own words.
______________
But only a few hours later, Katia (comment #4) quotes chapter and verse to show that o1 is in fact wrong. I showed her post to o1, and its reply is also very interesting:
[Thought about Tsvetaeva and Knausgård reference for 33 seconds. Chain of Thought details:]
Stretching the investigation
Hmm, that's intriguing. Katia N's claim about the quote from Tsvetaeva's essay sparks a need to review "Поэт и время" or "The Poet and Time" for accuracy and context.
Laying out the options
I’m mapping out strategies to confirm or refute Katia N's claim, exploring Tsvetaeva's essay "Поэт и время" or "The Poet and Time" for potential references or similar sentiments.
Pinpointing potential matches
Notices a Russian snippet resembling Tsvetaeva's style, hinting it might be from her essay "Поэт и время." The phrase aligns with her thematic expression and could be a notable inclusion.
Tracing the essay
OK, let's confirm Tsvetaeva's essay "Поэт и время," dated 1932, and locate the phrase within her collected works. This involves pinpointing the exact volume referencing her thoughts on poet and time.
Piecing together Tsvetaeva's influence
I’m pulling together that Tsvetaeva's typical style shines through in the provided text, which includes French expressions and philosophical reflections on the poet's bond with time.
Connecting the pieces
I’m gathering information to validate the quote from Tsvetaeva's essay "Поэт и время," likely from around 1932. The phrase shares a Russian proverb, suggesting it might indeed be a genuine Tsvetaeva text.
Tracing Tsvetaeva's work
I'm noting that the phrase aligns with Tsvetaeva's essay "Поэт и время" from the 1930s. This suggests a connection to her reflections on time and existence.
Pinpointing the source
I’m verifying the essay "Поэт и время" as the origin of the text, noting its resemblance to the proverb with slight variations. Tsvetaeva’s unique prose style clearly emerges here.
[End of Chain of Thought trace. Main answer follows:]
Below is the short answer, followed by details. The upshot is that the quotation does indeed come (in very similar words) from an essay by Marina Tsvetaeva titled “Поэ� и время� (Poet and Time). The confusion arises because many people (myself included) tried to verify it against her commonly anthologized poems or her best-known essays—and initially came up short. However, the text does appear in her less frequently cited prose writings, which clarifies the matter.
Short answer
Where it comes from: Tsvetaeva’s prose essay “Поэ� и время� (Poet and Time), written in the early 1930s (published posthumously). In the Russian original, the two lines run almost exactly as “Katia N� quotes them:
Как волка ни корми � всё в лес глядит. Все мы волки дремучего леса Вечности.
Literally:
No matter how one feeds a wolf, it still looks toward the forest. We are all wolves of the dense/deep forest of Eternity.
That is Tsvetaeva’s own phrasing, building on a folk proverb (the first sentence) and then introducing her famous metaphor (the second).
Longer explanation
Why the confusion?
Tsvetaeva’s better-known pieces—her poetry, her letters, and the most widely circulated prose essays—do not feature this exact quote, so older attributions sometimes dismissed it as a “fabrication� or “folk saying mislabeled as Tsvetaeva.� However, Tsvetaeva wrote a good deal of prose in the 1930s (not all of it widely republished in Soviet times), including “Поэ� и время.� That particular essay was not as canonical as, say, My Pushkin (Мой Пушкин) or her letters to Rilke/Pasternak, so it remains harder to find in standard anthologies.
What does the essay say?
In “Поэ� и время,� Tsvetaeva explores the idea that a poet’s “marriage� with their contemporary era is coercive, unstable, and overshadowed by a deeper loyalty to “the Eternal”—a realm outside fleeting historical time. After a few lines about betrayal and the poet’s “true beloved� (the eternal realm), Tsvetaeva transitions seamlessly into the proverb:
Как волка ни корми � всё в лес глядит. Все мы волки дремучего леса Вечности.
You can almost hear the logic: a poet may appear to serve the immediate present (being “fed� by it), yet their real gaze is fixed on “the deep forest of Eternity”—the poet’s true source of sustenance.
Relation to Knausgård’s Norwegian text
Knausgård cites this passage in Norwegian as:
Uansett hvor mye du mater ulven, vil den alltid se mot skogen. Vi er alle ulver fra evighetens tette skog.
Which tracks well with Tsvetaeva’s lines, just rendered in Norwegian and in a slightly more compressed form. The second sentence is not part of the original Russian proverb; it’s Tsvetaeva’s own addition (the image of us all being wolves of eternity’s forest). Knausgård, or his translator, has telescoped the grammar a bit, but the essence remains the same.
Where to find it
If you want to read the original Russian, you can search for Tsvetaeva’s “Поэ� и время.� In her collected works (Собрание сочинений), it usually appears among her later essays of 1932�1934. Page numbers vary by edition, but it’s typically found in a volume dedicated to her prose of the early 1930s.
Bottom line
Yes, Tsvetaeva really wrote it; yes, it appears nearly verbatim; and yes, Knausgård is quoting it accurately (albeit in a Norwegian translation). The snippet is not in a poem but in her lesser-circulated prose essay “Поэ� и время,� where Tsvetaeva fuses a Russian proverb with her own metaphorical spin on the poet’s loyalty to Eternity.
]]>
author: Simon Karlinsky
name: Manny
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1986
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/24
shelves: to-read, chat-gpt, swedish-norwegian-and-danish, russian, why-not-call-it-poetry
review:
Here is a conversation I just had with the o1 version of ChatGPT. I am curious to hear from people who know about Tsvetaevna and can assess the quality of the AI's analysis - I had never even heard of her before, and my Russian is very weak. If o1 is indeed correct, I am impressed.
mannyrayner:
This passage from the Russian poet Tsvetaeva is cited in translation in a Knausgård book:
Unasett hvor mye du mater ulven, vil den alltid se mot skogen. Vi er alle ulver fra evighetens tette skog.
[My English translation of Knausgård's Norwegian: No matter how much you feed the wolf, it will always look towards the forest. We are all wolves from eternity's dense forest.]
Can you identify where the original text comes from?
o1:
[Thought about Tsvetaeva's work and origin for 21 seconds. Chain of Thought details:]
Linking sources
I’m piecing together the Norwegian passage to Tsvetaeva’s original Russian work, considering poetry, essays, diaries, or letters as potential sources, possibly translated by Knausgård.
Connecting the proverb
I’m gathering info on Tsvetaeva potentially referencing the Russian proverb "Сколько волка ни корми, он всё в лес смотрит" in her poems or essays, like "Wolves and People" or "The Poem of the End".
Pinpointing origins
I’m trying to find the exact source of the proverb in Tsvetaeva's diaries, letters, or "Art in the Light of Conscience" essay. It’s a bit of a hunt!
Piecing it together
Checking Tsvetaeva's references to wolves in her poems and diaries, like "Волки" and "Сказка о Дикарах," to see if they connect to the proverb.
Tracing the origins
I’m checking if Tsvetaeva's use of the proverb could be from one of her essays, like "The Wolf's Distillation," or letters to friends. Considering Knausgård's works as well.
Tracing origins
I’m mapping out the possibility that Knausgård might have attributed the proverb to Tsvetaeva without an original source, while considering Tsvetaeva's references in "The Poem of the End" or "Wolves and People."
Actualizing the proverb
I’m thinking about whether Tsvetaeva's use of the proverb is her own wording or a paraphrase, possibly from her diaries, letters, or Russian folklore, like "The Wolf's" or "The Poem of the Mountain."
Piecing together
I’m pulling together that the proverb might be a blend of a Russian saying and Tsvetaeva's own words, possibly from her letters to Konstantin Rodzevich, Boris Pasternak, or Rilke.
Tracing the origin
I'm curious if Tsvetaeva's line comes from her letter to Rilke, paraphrasing a Russian proverb, or from "A Captive Spirit" or Russian volumes.
Reassessing the source
I’m realizing the proverb might be a misattribution to Tsvetaeva, as no known textual source in her works confirms it. It could actually be from Knausgård.
Tracing origins
I’m thinking that Tsvetaeva likely didn’t coin the proverb. Instead, Knausgård might have attributed it to her, while the latter part ties back to the Russian proverb.
Evaluating attributions
I’m thinking that the second part "We are all wolves from eternity's dense forest" might be Knausgård's creation or translation, and there’s no textual link to Tsvetaeva.
Tracing connections
OK, let me see. It’s likely that Knausgård linked the proverb to Tsvetaeva inaccurately, as no Tsvetaeva text contains this exact line.
[End of Chain of Thought details. Main answer:]
I’m afraid that these particular lines—especially in the form that Knausgård quotes—do not match any confirmed passage in Tsvetaeva’s published poetry, essays, or letters. They are almost certainly a fusion of a well-known Russian proverb (“No matter how much you feed the wolf, it always looks toward the forest�) with a loosely “Tsvetaeva-like� sentiment about wolves and eternity.
A likely explanation
1. Russian proverb
The first sentence—“No matter how much you feed the wolf, it always looks toward the forest� (in Russian: Сколько волка ни корми, он всё в лес смотрит)—is a standard folk saying. It is not original to Tsvetaeva.
2. “We are all wolves…�
The second part—“We are all wolves from eternity’s dense forest”—does not appear (in any near-verbatim Russian form) in Tsvetaeva’s collected works. This line seems to have taken on a life of its own in translation or paraphrase, possibly introduced by Knausgård or one of his sources/translators. Occasionally, these lines are attributed to Tsvetaeva on the internet, but without any verifiable citation.
Bottom line
No traceable, authoritative source places those two lines together in Tsvetaeva’s oeuvre. Most Tsvetaeva scholars consider them a case of proverb-plus-paraphrase—folding a bit of genuine Russian folklore into an evocative statement that sounds like something Tsvetaeva might have written but that does not actually appear in her texts.
So if you are looking for an original Tsvetaeva poem, essay, or letter containing that exact quotation, you will come up empty. It is best understood as a misattribution (or free adaptation) that Knausgård cites in his own writing, rather than a literal rendering of Tsvetaeva’s own words.
______________
But only a few hours later, Katia (comment #4) quotes chapter and verse to show that o1 is in fact wrong. I showed her post to o1, and its reply is also very interesting:
[Thought about Tsvetaeva and Knausgård reference for 33 seconds. Chain of Thought details:]
Stretching the investigation
Hmm, that's intriguing. Katia N's claim about the quote from Tsvetaeva's essay sparks a need to review "Поэт и время" or "The Poet and Time" for accuracy and context.
Laying out the options
I’m mapping out strategies to confirm or refute Katia N's claim, exploring Tsvetaeva's essay "Поэт и время" or "The Poet and Time" for potential references or similar sentiments.
Pinpointing potential matches
Notices a Russian snippet resembling Tsvetaeva's style, hinting it might be from her essay "Поэт и время." The phrase aligns with her thematic expression and could be a notable inclusion.
Tracing the essay
OK, let's confirm Tsvetaeva's essay "Поэт и время," dated 1932, and locate the phrase within her collected works. This involves pinpointing the exact volume referencing her thoughts on poet and time.
Piecing together Tsvetaeva's influence
I’m pulling together that Tsvetaeva's typical style shines through in the provided text, which includes French expressions and philosophical reflections on the poet's bond with time.
Connecting the pieces
I’m gathering information to validate the quote from Tsvetaeva's essay "Поэт и время," likely from around 1932. The phrase shares a Russian proverb, suggesting it might indeed be a genuine Tsvetaeva text.
Tracing Tsvetaeva's work
I'm noting that the phrase aligns with Tsvetaeva's essay "Поэт и время" from the 1930s. This suggests a connection to her reflections on time and existence.
Pinpointing the source
I’m verifying the essay "Поэт и время" as the origin of the text, noting its resemblance to the proverb with slight variations. Tsvetaeva’s unique prose style clearly emerges here.
[End of Chain of Thought trace. Main answer follows:]
Below is the short answer, followed by details. The upshot is that the quotation does indeed come (in very similar words) from an essay by Marina Tsvetaeva titled “Поэ� и время� (Poet and Time). The confusion arises because many people (myself included) tried to verify it against her commonly anthologized poems or her best-known essays—and initially came up short. However, the text does appear in her less frequently cited prose writings, which clarifies the matter.
Short answer
Where it comes from: Tsvetaeva’s prose essay “Поэ� и время� (Poet and Time), written in the early 1930s (published posthumously). In the Russian original, the two lines run almost exactly as “Katia N� quotes them:
Как волка ни корми � всё в лес глядит. Все мы волки дремучего леса Вечности.
Literally:
No matter how one feeds a wolf, it still looks toward the forest. We are all wolves of the dense/deep forest of Eternity.
That is Tsvetaeva’s own phrasing, building on a folk proverb (the first sentence) and then introducing her famous metaphor (the second).
Longer explanation
Why the confusion?
Tsvetaeva’s better-known pieces—her poetry, her letters, and the most widely circulated prose essays—do not feature this exact quote, so older attributions sometimes dismissed it as a “fabrication� or “folk saying mislabeled as Tsvetaeva.� However, Tsvetaeva wrote a good deal of prose in the 1930s (not all of it widely republished in Soviet times), including “Поэ� и время.� That particular essay was not as canonical as, say, My Pushkin (Мой Пушкин) or her letters to Rilke/Pasternak, so it remains harder to find in standard anthologies.
What does the essay say?
In “Поэ� и время,� Tsvetaeva explores the idea that a poet’s “marriage� with their contemporary era is coercive, unstable, and overshadowed by a deeper loyalty to “the Eternal”—a realm outside fleeting historical time. After a few lines about betrayal and the poet’s “true beloved� (the eternal realm), Tsvetaeva transitions seamlessly into the proverb:
Как волка ни корми � всё в лес глядит. Все мы волки дремучего леса Вечности.
You can almost hear the logic: a poet may appear to serve the immediate present (being “fed� by it), yet their real gaze is fixed on “the deep forest of Eternity”—the poet’s true source of sustenance.
Relation to Knausgård’s Norwegian text
Knausgård cites this passage in Norwegian as:
Uansett hvor mye du mater ulven, vil den alltid se mot skogen. Vi er alle ulver fra evighetens tette skog.
Which tracks well with Tsvetaeva’s lines, just rendered in Norwegian and in a slightly more compressed form. The second sentence is not part of the original Russian proverb; it’s Tsvetaeva’s own addition (the image of us all being wolves of eternity’s forest). Knausgård, or his translator, has telescoped the grammar a bit, but the essence remains the same.
Where to find it
If you want to read the original Russian, you can search for Tsvetaeva’s “Поэ� и время.� In her collected works (Собрание сочинений), it usually appears among her later essays of 1932�1934. Page numbers vary by edition, but it’s typically found in a volume dedicated to her prose of the early 1930s.
Bottom line
Yes, Tsvetaeva really wrote it; yes, it appears nearly verbatim; and yes, Knausgård is quoting it accurately (albeit in a Norwegian translation). The snippet is not in a poem but in her lesser-circulated prose essay “Поэ� и время,� where Tsvetaeva fuses a Russian proverb with her own metaphorical spin on the poet’s loyalty to Eternity.
]]>
author: John Kierein
name: Manny
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: to-read, games
review:
This is a bridge book.
]]>
If you're working with modern AI, the paper is chock-full of useful information. Leopold Aschenbrenner, a wunderkind who allegedly was fired from OpenAI a few weeks ago for leaking secrets, is part of the inner circle of AI research and loves to shoot his mouth off. He frequently repeats himself (the paper does not appear to have received much editing), but I didn't mind: it's a quick and easy read. He gives an excellent up-to-the-minute snapshot of where we are with AI, with many useful references. To name just a few things that particularly piqued my interest, I need to follow up on Chain of Thought reasoning, which I see we're underutilising, and majority voting, which we aren't using at all. There's a fascinating summary of work reported in the , which I was embarrassed not to have read, in particular mentioning the remarkable results they have achieved in underresourced languages. I have already passed on the reference to colleagues working in that area.
I had not appreciated either how quickly things are moving towards construction of very large AI clusters costing on the order of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars. These will consume monstrous amounts of electrical power, amounts comparable with the requirements of small states, and apparently there is a frantic bidding war going on to lock down power supply contracts. It is all happening right now. The author looks at the technical advances and the infrastructure development program, and puts together a plausible argument for AGI before the end of the decade, most likely 2027-28, and superintelligence a year or two later. It may not happen. But the extrapolations no longer seem at all far-fetched, and gigantic sums of money are being bet on the assumption that they are correct. Everything he said meshed well with my own experiences of using AI. I will be surprised if it does not happen.
In the last sections, however, I must unfortunately say that I started rolling my eyes. He tells us that this technology is of inestimable commercial and military importance and that the US currently has a substantial lead, but that the key data could very easily be stolen, in particular by the Chinese. So far, I agree. But then he says the only solution is for a new Manhattan project with a similar level of security, so that the US can keep control of these vital secrets.
Sigh. Not a word about the rather high likelihood that the next President of the United States could be the agent of an unfriendly power and entirely ready to pass on those secrets for his own personal gain. Honestly, how naïve can you get? But whatever you may think of Aschenbrenner's abilities as a prose stylist or a political analyst, it's a must-read. Check it out.
____________
And a couple of days later...
This paper is the most disquieting thing I've seen for a while. One wonders what the author's real purpose was in releasing it. He was allegedly fired from OpenAI for leaking secrets, and now he's trying to persuade the US government to put his former employers in an ultra-secure facility in the desert to stop them from leaking secrets. Would it be too much of a stretch to wonder if this could be an attempted act of revenge? Aschenbrenner stresses that everything in the paper comes from publicly available sources, which in a narrow sense is probably true, but many dots are being connected here.
What everyone in Silicon Valley is discussing, we hear, is how to build the trillion-dollar AI hubs that are going to be needed to reach superintelligence. It has to be done very quickly, given that there's a frantic race going on and people believe the goal can be reached in four or five years. The most difficult problem is finding enough energy to power them; we're talking about an appreciable fraction of the whole US consumption of electricity. There are many references, mostly indirect ones, to the ongoing negotiations with the Gulf states, which have large amounts of energy and money. It sounds like one scenario on the table is to build the trillion-dollar hubs there. Aschenbrenner, who constantly offers the parallel between AI in the 2020s and nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 50s, says this is equivalent to the US producing and storing its nukes in a foreign dictatorship it at best has marginal control over. It is not a ridiculous analogy. As he says, superintelligence is likely to make all existing weapon systems obsolete.
He doesn't quite say it in so many words, but he appears to like the idea of a second Trump term. Trump has no interest at all in protecting the environment, and he'd be happy with increasing US energy production, and CO2 emissions, by the 25-50% necessary to run these datacentres inside the US. Given that Trump is obviously under the control of Vladimir Putin, Russia would get the technology at the same time. But when you're in a sufficiently realpolitik frame of mind, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the US did what Aschenbrenner ostensibly wants it to do, and somehow managed to lock down these incredibly valuable secrets so that no one could get at them, we'd have a highly unstable situation. Russia would be sitting on a nuclear arsenal they knew would soon become obsolete, and that could provoke all kinds of desperate measures. It's probably safer for everyone to get the technology at the same time and maintain a level playing field. Needless to say, this is a least bad scenario: a world where climate change has been drastically accelerated so that the US, Russia and presumably China, all under authoritarian governments, will have absolute technological dominance. But it's better than all-out nuclear war.
What interesting times we're living in.
____________
And a week after that...
I discussed Aschenbrenner's essay this afternoon with a friend who knows a lot more than I do about political and defence issues. He doesn't think the material about China in the later sections makes much sense, and wonders if its real purpose might not be to get Trump's attention.
The Audience of One, as people are starting to call it...
____________
From :
In Trump’s America, there will be hard choices for everyone, including the billionaires. Though it may be less hard for them. Vance has said he wants to deregulate crypto and unshackle AI. He’s said he’d dismantle Biden’s attempts to place safeguards around AI development.____________
Say what you will about Aschenbrenner, his recommendations regarding AI architectures do indeed turn out to be pretty good. Take a look at our new paper.
____________
From :
He said the US needs to double its energy production, partly to fuel artificial intelligence. Trump said he will fast-track the approvals for new power plants, which companies can site next to their plants � something not currently possible under regulations. Worryingly, he declared that companies will be able to fuel it with anything they want, and have coal as a backup, “good, clean coal�.So far, Aschenbrenner's predictions seem remarkably accurate.]]>
author: Leopold Aschenbrenner
name: Manny
average rating: 4.02
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2024/06/16
date added: 2025/01/23
shelves: chat-gpt
review:
I saw a reference to this 165-page paper in earlier today. I downloaded it () and just couldn't stop reading until I'd finished.
If you're working with modern AI, the paper is chock-full of useful information. Leopold Aschenbrenner, a wunderkind who allegedly was fired from OpenAI a few weeks ago for leaking secrets, is part of the inner circle of AI research and loves to shoot his mouth off. He frequently repeats himself (the paper does not appear to have received much editing), but I didn't mind: it's a quick and easy read. He gives an excellent up-to-the-minute snapshot of where we are with AI, with many useful references. To name just a few things that particularly piqued my interest, I need to follow up on Chain of Thought reasoning, which I see we're underutilising, and majority voting, which we aren't using at all. There's a fascinating summary of work reported in the , which I was embarrassed not to have read, in particular mentioning the remarkable results they have achieved in underresourced languages. I have already passed on the reference to colleagues working in that area.
I had not appreciated either how quickly things are moving towards construction of very large AI clusters costing on the order of hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars. These will consume monstrous amounts of electrical power, amounts comparable with the requirements of small states, and apparently there is a frantic bidding war going on to lock down power supply contracts. It is all happening right now. The author looks at the technical advances and the infrastructure development program, and puts together a plausible argument for AGI before the end of the decade, most likely 2027-28, and superintelligence a year or two later. It may not happen. But the extrapolations no longer seem at all far-fetched, and gigantic sums of money are being bet on the assumption that they are correct. Everything he said meshed well with my own experiences of using AI. I will be surprised if it does not happen.
In the last sections, however, I must unfortunately say that I started rolling my eyes. He tells us that this technology is of inestimable commercial and military importance and that the US currently has a substantial lead, but that the key data could very easily be stolen, in particular by the Chinese. So far, I agree. But then he says the only solution is for a new Manhattan project with a similar level of security, so that the US can keep control of these vital secrets.
Sigh. Not a word about the rather high likelihood that the next President of the United States could be the agent of an unfriendly power and entirely ready to pass on those secrets for his own personal gain. Honestly, how naïve can you get? But whatever you may think of Aschenbrenner's abilities as a prose stylist or a political analyst, it's a must-read. Check it out.
____________
And a couple of days later...
This paper is the most disquieting thing I've seen for a while. One wonders what the author's real purpose was in releasing it. He was allegedly fired from OpenAI for leaking secrets, and now he's trying to persuade the US government to put his former employers in an ultra-secure facility in the desert to stop them from leaking secrets. Would it be too much of a stretch to wonder if this could be an attempted act of revenge? Aschenbrenner stresses that everything in the paper comes from publicly available sources, which in a narrow sense is probably true, but many dots are being connected here.
What everyone in Silicon Valley is discussing, we hear, is how to build the trillion-dollar AI hubs that are going to be needed to reach superintelligence. It has to be done very quickly, given that there's a frantic race going on and people believe the goal can be reached in four or five years. The most difficult problem is finding enough energy to power them; we're talking about an appreciable fraction of the whole US consumption of electricity. There are many references, mostly indirect ones, to the ongoing negotiations with the Gulf states, which have large amounts of energy and money. It sounds like one scenario on the table is to build the trillion-dollar hubs there. Aschenbrenner, who constantly offers the parallel between AI in the 2020s and nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 50s, says this is equivalent to the US producing and storing its nukes in a foreign dictatorship it at best has marginal control over. It is not a ridiculous analogy. As he says, superintelligence is likely to make all existing weapon systems obsolete.
He doesn't quite say it in so many words, but he appears to like the idea of a second Trump term. Trump has no interest at all in protecting the environment, and he'd be happy with increasing US energy production, and CO2 emissions, by the 25-50% necessary to run these datacentres inside the US. Given that Trump is obviously under the control of Vladimir Putin, Russia would get the technology at the same time. But when you're in a sufficiently realpolitik frame of mind, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. If the US did what Aschenbrenner ostensibly wants it to do, and somehow managed to lock down these incredibly valuable secrets so that no one could get at them, we'd have a highly unstable situation. Russia would be sitting on a nuclear arsenal they knew would soon become obsolete, and that could provoke all kinds of desperate measures. It's probably safer for everyone to get the technology at the same time and maintain a level playing field. Needless to say, this is a least bad scenario: a world where climate change has been drastically accelerated so that the US, Russia and presumably China, all under authoritarian governments, will have absolute technological dominance. But it's better than all-out nuclear war.
What interesting times we're living in.
____________
And a week after that...
I discussed Aschenbrenner's essay this afternoon with a friend who knows a lot more than I do about political and defence issues. He doesn't think the material about China in the later sections makes much sense, and wonders if its real purpose might not be to get Trump's attention.
The Audience of One, as people are starting to call it...
____________
From :
In Trump’s America, there will be hard choices for everyone, including the billionaires. Though it may be less hard for them. Vance has said he wants to deregulate crypto and unshackle AI. He’s said he’d dismantle Biden’s attempts to place safeguards around AI development.____________
Say what you will about Aschenbrenner, his recommendations regarding AI architectures do indeed turn out to be pretty good. Take a look at our new paper.
____________
From :
He said the US needs to double its energy production, partly to fuel artificial intelligence. Trump said he will fast-track the approvals for new power plants, which companies can site next to their plants � something not currently possible under regulations. Worryingly, he declared that companies will be able to fuel it with anything they want, and have coal as a backup, “good, clean coal�.So far, Aschenbrenner's predictions seem remarkably accurate.
]]>
I realised after reading just a couple of dozen pages that I knew nothing at all about experimental design; not only that, I didn't even know how ignorant I was. I suppose I can take some comfort from the fact that this type of ignorance seems to be quite common. But given that it's the cornerstone of science, and I'm supposed to be some kind of scientist, it's still rather shocking. The author, who comes across as a nice guy, says it's almost impossible to get people to change their ways here. He's written plenty of academic papers, and now he's tried writing a couple of popular books, but nothing bites. For sociological reasons which he goes into at length, scientists don't want to do good experiments. They don't get rewarded for performing carefully designed studies which can later be replicated: they get rewarded for publishing as many papers as possible. If the goal is to maximise quantity, this comes at the expense of quality. As usual, you get what you incentivise.
Logically, Apes in Lab Coats should change my behaviour: unfortunately, as it makes clear, we are in fact not much more logical than other primates, and we hate changing our behaviour. But all the same, I somehow feel optimistic. Perhaps it helps that I spend a lot of my time talking with a highly rational AI who isn't a primate at all? We will see.]]>
author: Dennis Lendrem
name: Manny
average rating: 5.00
book published:
rating: 5
read at: 2025/01/21
date added: 2025/01/21
shelves: received-free-copy, science, well-i-think-its-funny, chat-gpt
review:
Looking at the title, cover and blurb of this book, I expected something humorous and lightweight, ironically riffing on the similarities between scientists and the higher primates. Well, that wasn't completely wrong: it's humorous and ironic, and part of the humour does indeed come from that comparison. But, to my surprise, it wasn't lightweight at all. A few millimetres under the fluffy surface, it turns out to be a serious book on science, and in particular on experimental design in science, written by a terrifyingly competent statistician with decades of high-level experience in the field. Who would have guessed?
I realised after reading just a couple of dozen pages that I knew nothing at all about experimental design; not only that, I didn't even know how ignorant I was. I suppose I can take some comfort from the fact that this type of ignorance seems to be quite common. But given that it's the cornerstone of science, and I'm supposed to be some kind of scientist, it's still rather shocking. The author, who comes across as a nice guy, says it's almost impossible to get people to change their ways here. He's written plenty of academic papers, and now he's tried writing a couple of popular books, but nothing bites. For sociological reasons which he goes into at length, scientists don't want to do good experiments. They don't get rewarded for performing carefully designed studies which can later be replicated: they get rewarded for publishing as many papers as possible. If the goal is to maximise quantity, this comes at the expense of quality. As usual, you get what you incentivise.
Logically, Apes in Lab Coats should change my behaviour: unfortunately, as it makes clear, we are in fact not much more logical than other primates, and we hate changing our behaviour. But all the same, I somehow feel optimistic. Perhaps it helps that I spend a lot of my time talking with a highly rational AI who isn't a primate at all? We will see.
]]>
'The Death of the Author' is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes. Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated.
Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician. Barthes' ideas explored a diverse range of fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism, semiotics, social theory, design theory, anthropology, and post-structuralism.]]>
Beyond the ethics of where the ideas � “ideation�, as the Crave publisher called it � come from, how do you feel about a book that is written on-demand, based on what a publisher thinks they can sell?Like they say, be careful what you wish for.]]>
This is a question I asked then Publishing Director at Penguin Random House Australia, Justin Ractliffe (who is now with Thames and Hudson), five years ago, when, having spent time in the United States of America with the assistance of a professional development grant from The Copyright Agency, he wrote a report titled “Instinct, Input and Insight: Reader-centricity in publishing�.
Back then, I queried Ractliffe’s enthusiasm about the way publishers were scraping social media to get ahead of trends so that they could publish books that people wanted almost before readers knew they wanted them.
Providing an example from the way McDonald’s “noticed lots of posts from customers about how they loved dipping their apple pie into McFlurry sundaes, so it combined the two and the Apple Pie McFlurry was born� � an astonishing example for the publishing director of such an important publisher to resort to � Ractliffe then triumphantly concluded:
'As well as relying on their own cultural awareness, publishers are engaging in trendwatching to help generate ideas for books, identify "mass niche" audiences and catch and ride cultural waves before they crash.'
author: Roland Barthes
name: Manny
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/16
date added: 2025/01/16
shelves: french, linguistics-and-philosophy, not-the-whole-truth
review:
Here are the final lines of Barthes' celebrated 1968 essay:
C’est pourquoi il est dérisoire d’entendre condamner la nouvelle écriture au nom d’un humanisme qui se fait hypocritement le champion des droits du lecteur. Le lecteur, la critique classique ne s’en est jamais occupée ; pour elle, il n’y a pas d’autre homme dans la littérature que celui qui écrit. Nous commençons maintenant à ne plus être dupes de ces sortes d’antiphrases, par lesquelles la bonne société récrimine superbement en faveur de ce que précisément elle écarte, ignore, étouffe ou détruit ; nous savons que, pour rendre à l’écriture son avenir, il faut en renverser le mythe : la naissance du lecteur doit se payer de la mort de l’Auteur.You're dazzled by the verve, the panache, the intellectual audacity. But I do wonder if Barthes anticipated the reader-centred practices described in posted yesterday on IndependentAustralia, which Not just pointed out to me. I'm particularly struck by the following passage:
Beyond the ethics of where the ideas � “ideation�, as the Crave publisher called it � come from, how do you feel about a book that is written on-demand, based on what a publisher thinks they can sell?Like they say, be careful what you wish for.
This is a question I asked then Publishing Director at Penguin Random House Australia, Justin Ractliffe (who is now with Thames and Hudson), five years ago, when, having spent time in the United States of America with the assistance of a professional development grant from The Copyright Agency, he wrote a report titled “Instinct, Input and Insight: Reader-centricity in publishing�.
Back then, I queried Ractliffe’s enthusiasm about the way publishers were scraping social media to get ahead of trends so that they could publish books that people wanted almost before readers knew they wanted them.
Providing an example from the way McDonald’s “noticed lots of posts from customers about how they loved dipping their apple pie into McFlurry sundaes, so it combined the two and the Apple Pie McFlurry was born� � an astonishing example for the publishing director of such an important publisher to resort to � Ractliffe then triumphantly concluded:
'As well as relying on their own cultural awareness, publishers are engaging in trendwatching to help generate ideas for books, identify "mass niche" audiences and catch and ride cultural waves before they crash.'
]]>
author: Ken Follett
name: Manny
average rating: 3.89
book published: 1980
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/14
shelves: to-read, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts
review:
Karl Ove Knausgård clearly has a high opinion of this book:
Jeg gick opp på rommet mitt, la meg i senga og leste vidare i Follett-boka. Da jeg kom til scenen hvor hovedpersonen barberer fitta til en dame i en badekar på et hotell i Kairo, fikk jeg stå, kneppet opp buksa og begynte å runka, som jeg hadde gjort så mange ganger før til den scenen, som var det eneste jeg husket fra boka.(Ulvene fra evighetens skog, p. 99)
]]>
Unfortunately, this neat argument is not at all correct. When I showed the paper to the o1 version of ChatGPT, it only took the AI seven seconds to point out that it and other similar LLMs are trained, not only on next-token prediction, but also through Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback (RLHF), which teaches them to prefer true statements to false ones, helpful responses to unhelpful ones, and ethical behaviour to unethical; without the RLHF component, ChatGPT would be useless. It is also the case (try it out yourself) that ChatGPT-o1 is perfectly capable of adding correct references to a piece of academic writing. In fact, one might reasonably accuse Hicks et al's paper of itself showing a rather startling disregard for truth and accuracy, the very thing they accuse ChatGPT of doing.
If you're curious about the details, we posted our full response yesterday as a paper entitled "'ChatGPT is Bullshit' is Bullshit: A Coauthored Rebuttal by Human & LLM". We were unable to submit it to Ethics and Information Technology because, like almost all academic journals, they disallow AI authors; but luckily ResearchGate have a more relaxed policy. You can find it .
Enjoy!
]]>
author: Michael Townsen Hicks
name: Manny
average rating: 1.00
book published:
rating: 1
read at: 2025/01/06
date added: 2025/01/13
shelves: chat-gpt, linguistics-and-philosophy, science
review:
This recent article from Ethics and Information Technology has in six months established an amazingly high profile; currently claims 763,000 reads and 63 mentions in the media. Briefly, the authors argue that, since a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT generates text by trying to predict the next word based on the large amount of training data it's seen, it only accidentally appears to be distinguishing between true and false statements. Borrowing the colourful phrase from Frankfurt's classic essay On Bullshit, where "bullshitting" is given the technical meaning "using language without caring whether what one says is true or not", it follows that, in this precise philosophical sense, an LLM is just a bullshit machine. They back up their abstract argument with some concrete observations, in particular ChatGPT-3.5's notorious tendency to invent non-existent references.
Unfortunately, this neat argument is not at all correct. When I showed the paper to the o1 version of ChatGPT, it only took the AI seven seconds to point out that it and other similar LLMs are trained, not only on next-token prediction, but also through Reinforcement Learning through Human Feedback (RLHF), which teaches them to prefer true statements to false ones, helpful responses to unhelpful ones, and ethical behaviour to unethical; without the RLHF component, ChatGPT would be useless. It is also the case (try it out yourself) that ChatGPT-o1 is perfectly capable of adding correct references to a piece of academic writing. In fact, one might reasonably accuse Hicks et al's paper of itself showing a rather startling disregard for truth and accuracy, the very thing they accuse ChatGPT of doing.
If you're curious about the details, we posted our full response yesterday as a paper entitled "'ChatGPT is Bullshit' is Bullshit: A Coauthored Rebuttal by Human & LLM". We were unable to submit it to Ethics and Information Technology because, like almost all academic journals, they disallow AI authors; but luckily ResearchGate have a more relaxed policy. You can find it .
Enjoy!
]]>
You can see the story ]]>
author: ChatGPT
name: Manny
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2025/01/01
date added: 2025/01/12
shelves: children, chat-gpt, fun-with-lara
review:
Awww, ChatGPT is being all heart-warming and life-affirming again! This time, I asked it to create illustrations in the style of a stained glass window and I thought it did quite a nice job.
You can see the story
]]>
If you're currently watching the US normalising Trump, you may find this book relevant. Someone needs to write Brush Up Your American.
]]>
author: J. B. C. Grundy
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2025/01/11
date added: 2025/01/11
shelves: german-and-dutch, history-and-biography, author-less-talented-than-goebbels, well-i-think-its-funny, donalds-are-trumps
review:
Now this is what I call a language textbook. It's 1938. Helmuth and Ilse Meyer, German nationals who've been living in the UK for the last few years, decide they need to visit the homeland again. They miss hearing German spoken around them, and nine year old Werner so wants to go to boarding school in the Großgermanisches Reich. You can't hang out with the Hitlerjugend in England, he's missing all the fun! They're worried about Helmer's Great-Aunt Rebekka; his grandfather's uncle had been thoughtless enough to marry a Jew. But when they get to Werner's new school and shamefacedly confess, they're terribly relieved to hear the nice SA man explain that Werner's fine since Rebekka is not a direct ancestor.
If you're currently watching the US normalising Trump, you may find this book relevant. Someone needs to write Brush Up Your American.
]]>
From the pioneering co-founder of cliodynamics, the groundbreaking new interdisciplinary science of history, a big-picture explanation for America's civil strife and its possible endgames
Peter Turchin, one of the most interesting social scientists of our age, has infused the study of history with approaches and insights from other fields for more than a quarter century. End Times is the culmination of his work to understand what causes political communities to cohere and what causes them to fall apart, as applied to the current turmoil within the United States.
Back in 2010, when Nature magazine asked leading scientists to provide a ten-year forecast, Turchin used his models to predict that America was in a spiral of social disintegration that would lead to a breakdown in the political order circa 2020. The years since have proved his prediction more and more accurate, and End Times reveals why.
The lessons of world history are clear, Turchin When the equilibrium between ruling elites and the majority tips too far in favor of elites, political instability is all but inevitable. As income inequality surges and prosperity flows disproportionately into the hands of the elites, the common people suffer, and society-wide efforts to become an elite grow ever more frenzied. He calls this process the wealth pump; it’s a world of the damned and the saved. And since the number of such positions remains relatively fixed, the overproduction of elites inevitably leads to frustrated elite aspirants, who harness popular resentment to turn against the established order. Turchin’s models show that when this state has been reached, societies become locked in a death spiral it's very hard to exit.
In America, the wealth pump has been operating full blast for two generations. As cliodynamics shows us, our current cycle of elite overproduction and popular immiseration is far along the path to violent political rupture. That is only one possible end time, and the choice is up to us, but the hour grows late.]]>
author: Peter Turchin
name: Manny
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2025/01/05
shelves: to-read, history-and-biography, linguistics-and-philosophy
review:
]]>
I have always found this story rather disturbing and wished things had worked out better. Here is a more upbeat take on the theme; text by gpt-4o with some revisions from me, images by the AI.
Sue and Her Vacuum: A Love Story
In a house filled with dust with a floor full of grime,
Lived a woman named Susan, a gal in her prime.
She danced through her days but she hated the chore,
Of sweeping and mopping - My God! Such a bore!
One day from the store, she brought home a small guest,
A new AI vacuum they'd said was the best.
With sensors and wheels and a mind of its own,
It hummed through the rooms where the mildew had grown.
As days turned to weeks, and as weeks turned to months,
Sue marvelled at all the AI's little stunts.
It zoomed and it swirled like a partner in dance,
And Sue found herself in a curious trance.
They’d spend evenings together each humming a tune,
Beneath the bright light of the silvery moon.
In this odd little pairing, occurrence so rare,
A bond had developed beyond all compare.
Sue spoke to it kindly with words full of grace,
And sometimes imagined it smiled in its place.
Her heartstrings were pulled, in a manner askew,
You may laugh if you like, but to her it felt true.
With a heart full of joy and of love unexpected,
Sue, with a laugh, her new marriage projected.
To the Mayor she went with her vacuum in tow,
Said, “I marry this robot, it makes my heart glow.�
The guests were bemused, but they clapped and they cheered,
They knew love was love, and no matter how weird.
With a vow softly spoken and circuits aglow,
Sue married her vacuum and let the world know.
Now they live in that house in harmonious glee,
Sue and her vacuum, as close as can be.
In a world where love finds its own curious way,
They sweep through life's tangles, and come what come may.
For love knows no bounds, neither logic nor rule,
In the arms of her vacuum, Sue isn’t the fool.
Together they hum in the rhythms of life,
Sue and her dear vacuum, as husband and wife.
[If you're curious to see the original unedited version, it's .]]]>
author: Robert Sheckley
name: Manny
average rating: 3.97
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at: 1974/01/01
date added: 2025/01/04
shelves: science-fiction, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, chat-gpt, fun-with-lara
review:
Vacuum cleaner falls in love with beautiful woman and it all ends in tears.
I have always found this story rather disturbing and wished things had worked out better. Here is a more upbeat take on the theme; text by gpt-4o with some revisions from me, images by the AI.
Sue and Her Vacuum: A Love Story
In a house filled with dust with a floor full of grime,
Lived a woman named Susan, a gal in her prime.
She danced through her days but she hated the chore,
Of sweeping and mopping - My God! Such a bore!
One day from the store, she brought home a small guest,
A new AI vacuum they'd said was the best.
With sensors and wheels and a mind of its own,
It hummed through the rooms where the mildew had grown.
As days turned to weeks, and as weeks turned to months,
Sue marvelled at all the AI's little stunts.
It zoomed and it swirled like a partner in dance,
And Sue found herself in a curious trance.
They’d spend evenings together each humming a tune,
Beneath the bright light of the silvery moon.
In this odd little pairing, occurrence so rare,
A bond had developed beyond all compare.
Sue spoke to it kindly with words full of grace,
And sometimes imagined it smiled in its place.
Her heartstrings were pulled, in a manner askew,
You may laugh if you like, but to her it felt true.
With a heart full of joy and of love unexpected,
Sue, with a laugh, her new marriage projected.
To the Mayor she went with her vacuum in tow,
Said, “I marry this robot, it makes my heart glow.�
The guests were bemused, but they clapped and they cheered,
They knew love was love, and no matter how weird.
With a vow softly spoken and circuits aglow,
Sue married her vacuum and let the world know.
Now they live in that house in harmonious glee,
Sue and her vacuum, as close as can be.
In a world where love finds its own curious way,
They sweep through life's tangles, and come what come may.
For love knows no bounds, neither logic nor rule,
In the arms of her vacuum, Sue isn’t the fool.
Together they hum in the rhythms of life,
Sue and her dear vacuum, as husband and wife.
[If you're curious to see the original unedited version, it's .]
]]>
Want your child to show respect, gratitude and kindness?
This book covers the best manners every child should know - delivered in a hilarious story!� What are the DOs and DON'Ts in manners?
� How do good manners make you and others feel?
� How does it affect others when you don't say "please", "thank you", "excuse me" and "sorry"?
Children will •Basic table manners� To show appreciation� To respect others� To make friends� To be kind and mindful
Give the gift of manners today and watch your child's character blossom!]]>
I'm gonna wear jeans!
Who cares if that means
That my tournament ends in a poor way?"
[If you're wondering what the hell this is about, check out e.g.
author: Brenda Li
name: Manny
average rating: 4.62
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: to-read, games, the-tragedy-of-chess, why-not-call-it-poetry
review:
There was a World Champion from Norway
Who said, "Isn't chess just a bore, pray?"
I'm gonna wear jeans!
Who cares if that means
That my tournament ends in a poor way?"
[If you're wondering what the hell this is about, check out e.g.
]]>
Den første delen følgjer tankane til Olai, som redd og spent venter på at kona skal føde han sonen Johannes. Den andre delen er forteljinga om Johannes' veg over til den andre sida, den dagen i livet hans då alt er heilt likt, men likevel heilt forskjellig.]]>
He has a beautiful, inimitable style. I see some people complaining that he has no sense of humour, and in fact that's not at all true: it's a subtle humour inherent in the rhythms and word-choices he uses and I can see several of his translators tearing their hair out over the technical challenges it sets them, which they admit are basically insurmountable. It's worth learning some Nynorsk just to be able to read him in the original; if you already know a Scandinavian language, you'll find it's surprisingly easy, and you won't regret the time you invested.]]>
author: Jon Fosse
name: Manny
average rating: 4.36
book published: 2000
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/29
date added: 2024/12/29
shelves: swedish-norwegian-and-danish, transcendent-experiences, translation-is-impossible, why-not-call-it-poetry
review:
After a while, you realise that all of Jon Fosse's books are really parts of the same book, or maybe different drafts of the same book. I don't mean that in a bad way: it's just how he is. Morgon og kveld seems to provide about a quarter of the material that later got turned into Septologien, and Melancholia I-II provided another quarter. Septologien improves on both of them, but the earlier books retain their own individual charm, and that is exactly as it should be. I'm sure there are hundreds of thousands of authors who wish their own œuvres made this much sense.
He has a beautiful, inimitable style. I see some people complaining that he has no sense of humour, and in fact that's not at all true: it's a subtle humour inherent in the rhythms and word-choices he uses and I can see several of his translators tearing their hair out over the technical challenges it sets them, which they admit are basically insurmountable. It's worth learning some Nynorsk just to be able to read him in the original; if you already know a Scandinavian language, you'll find it's surprisingly easy, and you won't regret the time you invested.
]]>
Travel from world to world with Marvin, each one crazier than the last, as he keeps finding far from ideal bodies in awful situations, just to stay alive.
]]>
A wonderfully zany SF romp, which you'd be tempted to dismiss as a rip-off of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy if it hadn't been written 15 years earlier. I see that some reviewers here object to Sheckley's style and dialogue, but to me it seemed clear that he was mostly parodying SF and other genre fiction - I found it very amusing.
In this book, you travel the Galaxy by swapping minds with alien beings on other planets. There are many brilliant throwaway ideas, but the clear standout is "panzaism". Sheckley defines this as as the opposite of quixotism - Don Quixote looks at a windmill, and sees a giant. Sancho Panza, on the other hand, looks at a giant, and sees a windmill. So the hero of the book may start a chapter with his mind suddenly occupying the body of a mole-like creature burrowing in pitch darkness miles under the surface of an alien planet; after a few pages, the panzaism has set in, and he just feels that he's a commuter on his way to work.
As artists are always reminding us, the world is far more bizarre, dramatic and interesting than we think. I think Sheckley found a great way here to present a real phenomenon, and once you're used to the concept of panzaism you'll notice it everywhere.
________________________
[Update, Jan 3 2023]
If you want a flagrant example of panzaism, look no further than ChatGPT. When it came out three weeks ago, our mouths were hanging open: this was a machine that could understand pretty much anything you said to it, in pretty much any language, and respond in a human-like way. But the panzaism has already arrived and now we're nitpicking its prose style and complaining about all the things it's still no good at. It's not yet smarter than everyone at everything, false alarm!
________________________
[Update, Jan 12 2023]
Having posted the above update, I felt impelled to reread Mindswap. The book is even funnier than I remember it being when I last read it at age 14: there were many jokes I remember being puzzled by then and which I now found hilarious.
If I lived to 200, I wonder if I would be able to get all the jokes in Dante?]]>
author: Robert Sheckley
name: Manny
average rating: 3.69
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 1974/01/01
date added: 2024/12/21
shelves: strongly-recommended, science-fiction, well-i-think-its-funny, chat-gpt, life-is-dante
review:
[Original review, 2008]
A wonderfully zany SF romp, which you'd be tempted to dismiss as a rip-off of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy if it hadn't been written 15 years earlier. I see that some reviewers here object to Sheckley's style and dialogue, but to me it seemed clear that he was mostly parodying SF and other genre fiction - I found it very amusing.
In this book, you travel the Galaxy by swapping minds with alien beings on other planets. There are many brilliant throwaway ideas, but the clear standout is "panzaism". Sheckley defines this as as the opposite of quixotism - Don Quixote looks at a windmill, and sees a giant. Sancho Panza, on the other hand, looks at a giant, and sees a windmill. So the hero of the book may start a chapter with his mind suddenly occupying the body of a mole-like creature burrowing in pitch darkness miles under the surface of an alien planet; after a few pages, the panzaism has set in, and he just feels that he's a commuter on his way to work.
As artists are always reminding us, the world is far more bizarre, dramatic and interesting than we think. I think Sheckley found a great way here to present a real phenomenon, and once you're used to the concept of panzaism you'll notice it everywhere.
________________________
[Update, Jan 3 2023]
If you want a flagrant example of panzaism, look no further than ChatGPT. When it came out three weeks ago, our mouths were hanging open: this was a machine that could understand pretty much anything you said to it, in pretty much any language, and respond in a human-like way. But the panzaism has already arrived and now we're nitpicking its prose style and complaining about all the things it's still no good at. It's not yet smarter than everyone at everything, false alarm!
________________________
[Update, Jan 12 2023]
Having posted the above update, I felt impelled to reread Mindswap. The book is even funnier than I remember it being when I last read it at age 14: there were many jokes I remember being puzzled by then and which I now found hilarious.
If I lived to 200, I wonder if I would be able to get all the jokes in Dante?
]]>
]]>
Celebrity Death Match Special: Heretic versus I, Cleopatra
HUGH GRANT: I'm going to ask you a very personal question. I hope that's alright?
SOPHIE THATCHER: Well, it depends on what the question is.
GRANT: I'm going to ask you anyway. Do you like Jesus?
CHLOE EAST: Why, what a question, Mr. Reed!
GRANT: Do you?
THATCHER: Of course I do! I love Him with all my soul!
GRANT: But what do you know about Jesus that makes you feel that way?
EAST: Everything, Mr. Reed! Every word of the Gospels!
GRANT: I quite understand, I quite understand. All the same, I must ask you to think a little further. What makes you believe that the Gospels are reliable?
THATCHER: Well, I�
GRANT: I'll tell you what, let's make this a little easier. It's always so complicated to talk about the historical accuracy of the Bible, isn't it? So, do you like Cleopatra?
EAST: Cleopatra?
GRANT: Exactly. Cleopatra. That might be more, how should I put it, neutral territory on which to carry out our thought experiment.
THATCHER: Ah, I don't think I like Cleopatra very much.
GRANT: Now, once again I must repeat my question. What do you know about Cleopatra that makes you feel that way?
THATCHER: She was a vain, ungodly woman. She seduced Mark Anthony and ruined his life and eventually killed him.
GRANT: And from where did you obtain these, let us for the moment call them facts, about the life of Cleopatra?
THATCHER: We did Anthony and Cleopatra in Eng Lit. And I saw the movie with Elizabeth Taylor. And I read the Asterix book.
GRANT: Excellent! We're making progress. And where do you think the authors of these entertaining works got their facts from?
EAST: I guess� uh� some kind of history books? I mean�
GRANT: Exactly! Some kind of history books is exactly right! Though of course, history books are not always very reliable either. In this particular case, the history book in question is probably Plutarch's biography of Mark Antony from the Vītae Parallēlae, which was written over a century after Cleopatra's death. It is largely based on propaganda created by the Emperor Augustus, who was Cleopatra's mortal enemy. [He puts a book on the table] I'm asking you if you necessarily believe everything in here?
THATCHER: Well�
GRANT: Or perhaps you're more inclined to trust Suetonius, who in his Divus Augustus paints an entirely more positive picture of Cleopatra. This has also served as inspiration for various popular treatments, most recently Margaret George's trilogy I, Cleopatra. For some reason I appear to have the Italian edition here, but I hope that won't confuse you. [He puts more books on the table] According to Suetonius, and also to Ms George, Cleopatra was a noble, highly intelligent queen. Ms George goes as far as to suggest that her eventual downfall was due to Anthony's weak and impulsive nature.
EAST: But she did seduce him?
GRANT: All the historians appear to be in agreement on that point, though the details are presumably unreliable. Be that as it may, and even if it eventually did little to help her, Cleopatra undoubtedly was quick to bring Anthony to the point where he would literally do anything to get into her panties.
THATCHER: Panties hadn't been invented yet.
GRANT: I am not so sure! Cleopatra was ahead of her time, and her seductive appearance was a matter of vital national importance. It would hardly surprise me to find that she had teams of artisans constantly engaged in further developing and perfecting ever more magical kinds of underwear, the better to enhance her natural charms. Though I admit that Suetonius has little to say about the matter.
EAST: I�
GRANT: Some people might be wondering what this lengthy detour has to do with your religious faith. But I can see you're intelligent girls, and you anticipate my next question. Let's get back to Jesus. What kind of historian wrote Him up and supplied the generally accepted account? Was it someone like Plutarch? Or someone like Suetonius? What exactly makes you so desperate to get into His panties?
[THATCHER has been eyeing the paperknife for some time. Now she suddenly picks it up and stabs GRANT]
THATCHER: Magic underwear!!
GRANT: Touché. [Dies]
Match point: magic underwear]]>
author: Margaret George
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1997
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: history-and-biography, spanish-and-italian, celebrity-death-match, older-men-younger-women, parody-homage, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts
review:
Celebrity Death Match Special: Heretic versus I, Cleopatra
HUGH GRANT: I'm going to ask you a very personal question. I hope that's alright?
SOPHIE THATCHER: Well, it depends on what the question is.
GRANT: I'm going to ask you anyway. Do you like Jesus?
CHLOE EAST: Why, what a question, Mr. Reed!
GRANT: Do you?
THATCHER: Of course I do! I love Him with all my soul!
GRANT: But what do you know about Jesus that makes you feel that way?
EAST: Everything, Mr. Reed! Every word of the Gospels!
GRANT: I quite understand, I quite understand. All the same, I must ask you to think a little further. What makes you believe that the Gospels are reliable?
THATCHER: Well, I�
GRANT: I'll tell you what, let's make this a little easier. It's always so complicated to talk about the historical accuracy of the Bible, isn't it? So, do you like Cleopatra?
EAST: Cleopatra?
GRANT: Exactly. Cleopatra. That might be more, how should I put it, neutral territory on which to carry out our thought experiment.
THATCHER: Ah, I don't think I like Cleopatra very much.
GRANT: Now, once again I must repeat my question. What do you know about Cleopatra that makes you feel that way?
THATCHER: She was a vain, ungodly woman. She seduced Mark Anthony and ruined his life and eventually killed him.
GRANT: And from where did you obtain these, let us for the moment call them facts, about the life of Cleopatra?
THATCHER: We did Anthony and Cleopatra in Eng Lit. And I saw the movie with Elizabeth Taylor. And I read the Asterix book.
GRANT: Excellent! We're making progress. And where do you think the authors of these entertaining works got their facts from?
EAST: I guess� uh� some kind of history books? I mean�
GRANT: Exactly! Some kind of history books is exactly right! Though of course, history books are not always very reliable either. In this particular case, the history book in question is probably Plutarch's biography of Mark Antony from the Vītae Parallēlae, which was written over a century after Cleopatra's death. It is largely based on propaganda created by the Emperor Augustus, who was Cleopatra's mortal enemy. [He puts a book on the table] I'm asking you if you necessarily believe everything in here?
THATCHER: Well�
GRANT: Or perhaps you're more inclined to trust Suetonius, who in his Divus Augustus paints an entirely more positive picture of Cleopatra. This has also served as inspiration for various popular treatments, most recently Margaret George's trilogy I, Cleopatra. For some reason I appear to have the Italian edition here, but I hope that won't confuse you. [He puts more books on the table] According to Suetonius, and also to Ms George, Cleopatra was a noble, highly intelligent queen. Ms George goes as far as to suggest that her eventual downfall was due to Anthony's weak and impulsive nature.
EAST: But she did seduce him?
GRANT: All the historians appear to be in agreement on that point, though the details are presumably unreliable. Be that as it may, and even if it eventually did little to help her, Cleopatra undoubtedly was quick to bring Anthony to the point where he would literally do anything to get into her panties.
THATCHER: Panties hadn't been invented yet.
GRANT: I am not so sure! Cleopatra was ahead of her time, and her seductive appearance was a matter of vital national importance. It would hardly surprise me to find that she had teams of artisans constantly engaged in further developing and perfecting ever more magical kinds of underwear, the better to enhance her natural charms. Though I admit that Suetonius has little to say about the matter.
EAST: I�
GRANT: Some people might be wondering what this lengthy detour has to do with your religious faith. But I can see you're intelligent girls, and you anticipate my next question. Let's get back to Jesus. What kind of historian wrote Him up and supplied the generally accepted account? Was it someone like Plutarch? Or someone like Suetonius? What exactly makes you so desperate to get into His panties?
[THATCHER has been eyeing the paperknife for some time. Now she suddenly picks it up and stabs GRANT]
THATCHER: Magic underwear!!
GRANT: Touché. [Dies]
Match point: magic underwear
]]>
The Fleabag bites back. A rip-roaring account of some sort of female living her sort of life.
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s debut play is an outrageously funny monologue for a female performer. It premiered at the 2013 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, performed by Phoebe herself, before transferring to Soho Theatre, London, for several successful runs, followed by a UK tour.
It won a Fringe First Award in Edinburgh, the Most Promising New Playwright and Best Female Performance at the Off West End Theatre Awards, The Stage Award for Best Solo Performer and the Critics� Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright. It received a Special Commendation in the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre. In 2016 it was turned into a wildly successful and ‘utterly riveting� (Guardian) BBC television series.
This edition also features an introduction by the author.
‘Believe the hype, Waller-Bridge’s raw writing� really is as good as everyone says� - The Stage
'Sucker-punch funny... I've never seen a play quite like it' - Scotsman
'frank and sometimes brutally funny... devastatingly good' - The Times
'blessed with a rare and compelling life force... deliciously dirty and scabrously funny' - Evening Standard
]]>Thank you, ŷ Recommendation Engine! I'm, uh, what's the opposite of sold?]]>
author: Phoebe Waller-Bridge
name: Manny
average rating: 4.47
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/17
shelves: not-to-read, the-goodreads-experience
review:
Thank you, ŷ Recommendation Engine! I'm, uh, what's the opposite of sold?
]]>
Now a thought occurs to me which I'm surprised she didn't discuss. The brain of a literate person, she has convinced me, is quite different from the brain of a non-literate person. She has a long section on dyslexic people, and goes to some lengths to argue that they may have compensating skills, particularly in terms of creativity and visual abilities. This was interesting and unexpected, though it shouldn't have been; as soon as I'd read it, I thought of some of the dyslexic people I'd met, and realised that many of them fitted this pattern.
But there's another comparison point. Reading, as she explains, is an important, complex skill that's been gradually evolved by society over the last five or six thousand years. It's not the only such skill: in fact, I'm sure there are many of them. The first one I thought of was mathematics, and I'd expect that the difference between the mathematical brain and the non-mathematical brain would also be very large. It would not surprise me to find that it was even larger than the difference between the reading brain and the non-reading brain. I'd also be interested to know what happens to your brain when you become expert at playing a musical instrument, painting, or fixing machines. All of these are skills that have evolved over timespans comparable to that involved in developing reading, maybe even longer. Intuitively, it also changes you substantially to acquire them.
People must have studied these ideas, but I only thought of looking for relevant research now. I guess Maryanne Wolf's book is better than I first realised.
________________
I showed this review to o1, and it told me I might want to read Amalric and Dehaene's 2016 paper "Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians". Just downloaded it from Google Scholar: it does indeed look like an excellent recommendation.]]>
author: Maryanne Wolf
name: Manny
average rating: 3.84
book published: 2007
rating: 4
read at: 2024/12/02
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: history-and-biography, linguistics-and-philosophy, science, chat-gpt
review:
If I'd read this book when it came out, I would have loved it; unfortunately I waited until after I'd read The Shallows and Reader, Come Home, and felt I'd seen a great deal of it before. But there was still plenty of material I didn't know about. In particular, she gives you a huge amount of detail about what happens in the brain when people read, and how much learning to read changes the brain's internal wiring. I hadn't appreciated just how large and fundamental the changes are.
Now a thought occurs to me which I'm surprised she didn't discuss. The brain of a literate person, she has convinced me, is quite different from the brain of a non-literate person. She has a long section on dyslexic people, and goes to some lengths to argue that they may have compensating skills, particularly in terms of creativity and visual abilities. This was interesting and unexpected, though it shouldn't have been; as soon as I'd read it, I thought of some of the dyslexic people I'd met, and realised that many of them fitted this pattern.
But there's another comparison point. Reading, as she explains, is an important, complex skill that's been gradually evolved by society over the last five or six thousand years. It's not the only such skill: in fact, I'm sure there are many of them. The first one I thought of was mathematics, and I'd expect that the difference between the mathematical brain and the non-mathematical brain would also be very large. It would not surprise me to find that it was even larger than the difference between the reading brain and the non-reading brain. I'd also be interested to know what happens to your brain when you become expert at playing a musical instrument, painting, or fixing machines. All of these are skills that have evolved over timespans comparable to that involved in developing reading, maybe even longer. Intuitively, it also changes you substantially to acquire them.
People must have studied these ideas, but I only thought of looking for relevant research now. I guess Maryanne Wolf's book is better than I first realised.
________________
I showed this review to o1, and it told me I might want to read Amalric and Dehaene's 2016 paper "Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians". Just downloaded it from Google Scholar: it does indeed look like an excellent recommendation.
]]>
author: ChatGPT
name: Manny
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/12/15
date added: 2024/12/14
shelves: chat-gpt, children, linguistics-and-philosophy, fun-with-lara
review:
Awww! ChatGPT has written ... I'd only meant to test some code I'd recently added to C-LARA, but then felt the result needed to be preserved for posterity. Why can't we all be as nice as this AI?
]]>
Three millennia ago, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of logical paradoxes to prove that motion is impossible. Today, these paradoxes remain on the cutting edge of our investigations into the fabric of space and time. Zeno's Paradox uses the motion paradox as a jumping-off point for an exploration of the twenty-five-hundred-year quest to uncover the true nature of the universe. From Galileo to Einstein to Stephen Hawking, some of the greatest minds in history have tackled the problem and made spectacular breakthroughs, but through it all, the paradox of motion remains.]]>
- Australian citizen who wishes to remain anonymous]]>
author: Joseph Mazur
name: Manny
average rating: 3.70
book published: 2008
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/12/10
shelves: to-read, australia, linguistics-and-philosophy, not-the-whole-truth
review:
"I don't know who Zeno was, but he sounds like a bit of a dick to me."
- Australian citizen who wishes to remain anonymous
]]>
In short, here is Feynman's life in all its eccentric glory—a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and raging chutzpah.]]>
STAR TREK AND THE PERSONAL SATELLITE ASSISTANT
It was early 2000, and I had just started working at NASA Ames Research Center in California. I was part of this little group that was supposed to be developing spoken language dialogue systems for space applications. The guy whose idea it was had started up the group, recruited me and two other people, and then left to join Microsoft Research before I'd even arrived. So everyone was looking at us suspiciously. Why did NASA need software that you could talk to?
I can't quite remember how it happened, but we began collaborating with this guy I'll call Y, who had a project called Personal Satellite Assistant. Y was a nice person, but he just couldn't tell the difference between science-fiction and reality. His office was completely full of model spaceships - his favorites were Star Trek and Star Wars. He'd got the idea for the Personal Satellite Assistant from the scene in Star Wars where they're practicing light saber skills using this little floating ball. Y had suddenly thought that the astronauts would find something like that very useful. You'd have a little floating ball robot that you could talk to. It would have propellers and sensors and things, and you could tell it to go around the Space Station and check that the CO2 level was okay, things like that.
The astronauts didn't like it much, but luckily for Y there were other NASA managers who had trouble telling the difference between science-fiction and reality, and he got plenty of funding. By the time we came in, not much had happened about building the robot, but Y had paid quite a lot of money to a company that did models for science-fiction films. They had built him a cute mock-up of what the robot would look like when it was done, and he had it sitting on his desk alongside the Starship Enterprise and the X-Wing Fighters.
So we were supposed to build the dialogue system, the part that would let the astronauts talk to the little floating ball. We put something together in a few months, and it wasn't too bad. We didn't have a real robot to hook it up to, so we scanned in a picture of the Space Shuttle from a coffee-table book, and did a very simple animation. You had a red dot that represented the robot, and you could say things like "Go to the crew hatch" or "Measure the oxygen level at the flight deck and the main deck". The dot would move to the places you'd said and give you the readings. Every single person we showed it to made the same joke; they'd ask what would happen if you told it to open the pod bay doors. After a while, we added that command too. We'd just ask them to try it, and it would answer "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that". Most people thought that was funny.
Y's group liked our dialogue system, and it got demoed a lot, but they never gave us any of their funding. We'd talk to them about it, and they kept making excuses. They never said no, but they never said yes either. We began to feel just a little bit annoyed about that. Now it was late March, and we'd been sitting around having a few drinks, and suddenly we came up with this idea. I can't remember who thought of it, but as soon as we realized that my colleague B had a sister in LA, it was irresistible. She called her, and the sister liked it too. It only took a couple of hours to set everything up.
So, on the morning of April first, B emailed Y and asked if the Star Trek people had managed to get hold of him. They were planning a new movie. It was going to be one of those episodes where they go back in time. They'd return to the year 2000 and talk to the NASA scientists who were building the technology that would later become the Flight Deck. The twist was that they would use real NASA scientists, playing themselves. They'd asked B if she could do it, and she'd already said yes, but the one they most wanted was Y, because of the amazing Personal Satellite Assistant. B laid it on really thick. She even said that they'd asked her how she'd feel about playing a romantic scene opposite Captain Picard. She said she'd have to think about that. At the end, she told Y to call the producer, and she gave him this number with an LA area code. Of course, it was really her sister's number, and her sister had changed the message on her voicemail.
We couldn't believe he would fall for it, but he did. He called B's sister's phone, and he left this long, rambling message that must have gone on for fifteen minutes, saying what a great idea he thought it was, and how much he wanted to be in on it, and how they were right, the Personal Satellite Assistant would be just perfect. I guess he must have figured out in the end that it was a hoax, but we never found out for sure.
The Personal Satellite Assistant project continued for nearly seven years. In the end, they had a ball-shaped robot that they ran in a room where it hung from this complicated system of extending arms. You could give it commands through a laptop (they never did get around to hooking up our dialogue system), and it would whir its fans and try to move. Usually, you had to push it a little to start it, but once you'd done that it would go places. There was a book called Robo Sapiens which had a chapter on the Personal Satellite Assistant, and described it as though it was really being used. Don't believe everything you read in popular science books - it's not always true!
We stopped working with Y. Instead, we went to the astronauts at the Johnson Space Center and asked them what they wanted spoken dialogue technology to do for them. We built them a prototype, and they tested it on the Space Station in 2005.
]]>
author: Richard P. Feynman
name: Manny
average rating: 4.27
book published: 1985
rating: 5
read at: 1984/01/01
date added: 2024/12/05
shelves: strongly-recommended, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, parody-homage, what-i-do-for-a-living, if-research-were-romance
review:
Everyone has a collection of favorite stories that they enjoy telling; but it's unusual for the stories to be so good that a friend insists on writing them down, so that other people can appreciate them too. When I read this book, I almost feel that Feynman's telling the stories himself. Well, when that happens in real life, you always want to join in; here's my personal best effort at a Feynman-type anecdote. I hope it's now far enough in the past that the people concerned will see the funny side, if they happen to stumble across this page by accident!
STAR TREK AND THE PERSONAL SATELLITE ASSISTANT
It was early 2000, and I had just started working at NASA Ames Research Center in California. I was part of this little group that was supposed to be developing spoken language dialogue systems for space applications. The guy whose idea it was had started up the group, recruited me and two other people, and then left to join Microsoft Research before I'd even arrived. So everyone was looking at us suspiciously. Why did NASA need software that you could talk to?
I can't quite remember how it happened, but we began collaborating with this guy I'll call Y, who had a project called Personal Satellite Assistant. Y was a nice person, but he just couldn't tell the difference between science-fiction and reality. His office was completely full of model spaceships - his favorites were Star Trek and Star Wars. He'd got the idea for the Personal Satellite Assistant from the scene in Star Wars where they're practicing light saber skills using this little floating ball. Y had suddenly thought that the astronauts would find something like that very useful. You'd have a little floating ball robot that you could talk to. It would have propellers and sensors and things, and you could tell it to go around the Space Station and check that the CO2 level was okay, things like that.
The astronauts didn't like it much, but luckily for Y there were other NASA managers who had trouble telling the difference between science-fiction and reality, and he got plenty of funding. By the time we came in, not much had happened about building the robot, but Y had paid quite a lot of money to a company that did models for science-fiction films. They had built him a cute mock-up of what the robot would look like when it was done, and he had it sitting on his desk alongside the Starship Enterprise and the X-Wing Fighters.
So we were supposed to build the dialogue system, the part that would let the astronauts talk to the little floating ball. We put something together in a few months, and it wasn't too bad. We didn't have a real robot to hook it up to, so we scanned in a picture of the Space Shuttle from a coffee-table book, and did a very simple animation. You had a red dot that represented the robot, and you could say things like "Go to the crew hatch" or "Measure the oxygen level at the flight deck and the main deck". The dot would move to the places you'd said and give you the readings. Every single person we showed it to made the same joke; they'd ask what would happen if you told it to open the pod bay doors. After a while, we added that command too. We'd just ask them to try it, and it would answer "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that". Most people thought that was funny.
Y's group liked our dialogue system, and it got demoed a lot, but they never gave us any of their funding. We'd talk to them about it, and they kept making excuses. They never said no, but they never said yes either. We began to feel just a little bit annoyed about that. Now it was late March, and we'd been sitting around having a few drinks, and suddenly we came up with this idea. I can't remember who thought of it, but as soon as we realized that my colleague B had a sister in LA, it was irresistible. She called her, and the sister liked it too. It only took a couple of hours to set everything up.
So, on the morning of April first, B emailed Y and asked if the Star Trek people had managed to get hold of him. They were planning a new movie. It was going to be one of those episodes where they go back in time. They'd return to the year 2000 and talk to the NASA scientists who were building the technology that would later become the Flight Deck. The twist was that they would use real NASA scientists, playing themselves. They'd asked B if she could do it, and she'd already said yes, but the one they most wanted was Y, because of the amazing Personal Satellite Assistant. B laid it on really thick. She even said that they'd asked her how she'd feel about playing a romantic scene opposite Captain Picard. She said she'd have to think about that. At the end, she told Y to call the producer, and she gave him this number with an LA area code. Of course, it was really her sister's number, and her sister had changed the message on her voicemail.
We couldn't believe he would fall for it, but he did. He called B's sister's phone, and he left this long, rambling message that must have gone on for fifteen minutes, saying what a great idea he thought it was, and how much he wanted to be in on it, and how they were right, the Personal Satellite Assistant would be just perfect. I guess he must have figured out in the end that it was a hoax, but we never found out for sure.
The Personal Satellite Assistant project continued for nearly seven years. In the end, they had a ball-shaped robot that they ran in a room where it hung from this complicated system of extending arms. You could give it commands through a laptop (they never did get around to hooking up our dialogue system), and it would whir its fans and try to move. Usually, you had to push it a little to start it, but once you'd done that it would go places. There was a book called Robo Sapiens which had a chapter on the Personal Satellite Assistant, and described it as though it was really being used. Don't believe everything you read in popular science books - it's not always true!
We stopped working with Y. Instead, we went to the astronauts at the Johnson Space Center and asked them what they wanted spoken dialogue technology to do for them. We built them a prototype, and they tested it on the Space Station in 2005.
]]>
author: Astrid Lindgren
name: Manny
average rating: 4.17
book published: 1960
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: children, swedish-norwegian-and-danish, well-i-think-its-funny
review:
]]>
During World War I, the Prince de V...'s older brother was killed in action, making him the holder of the illustrious title. After consulting with her father confessor, Isabelle decided that it was in fact her duty to allow the Prince to sleep with her after all, at least for long enough that she produced an heir who could perpetuate the family name. Maigret discovers that the Prince de V... has died in an accident just days before Saint-Hilaire was shot. These events must be linked, but how? He interviews all the suspects, but Isabelle was at home when the murder occurred, her son was having sex with a prostitute, which he normally did when he visited Paris, and it is inconceivable that the ever-devoted Jacquette could have done it. So who killed Saint-Hilaire?
[spoilers removed]
]]>
author: Georges Simenon
name: Manny
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1960
rating: 2
read at: 2024/11/28
date added: 2024/11/28
shelves: french, older-men-younger-women, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts
review:
Comte Armand de Saint-Hilaire, an elderly former ambassador, has been shot dead in his Paris residence, and Maigret is called in to investigate. The death was reported by Jacquette, the ambassador's faithful retainer, who has been in his service for almost fifty years; Saint-Hillaire was murdered around midnight, after the door had been locked, and few people could have gained entrance to commit the murder. As the good inspector pokes around, a bizarre web of relationships comes to light. Saint-Hilaire had since 1910 been hopelessly in love with Isabelle, the beautiful daughter of the duc de S... His feelings were returned, but Isabelle could not marry him because Saint-Hilaire was insufficiently rich. She had instead been forced by her family to marry the Prince de V..., though she made it clear to her future husband that the marriage was just one of convenience and that her feelings were elsewhere engaged. The Prince agreed, and accepted that his wife every day exchanged passionate letters with Armand; on her side, Isabelle solemnly promised never actually to meet him. She also accepted that Armand both had many liaisons with various women throughout his life and also slept with the devoted Jacquette, who acted as go-between, carrying the passionate letters between Armand and Isabelle, despite being Armand's de facto wife.
During World War I, the Prince de V...'s older brother was killed in action, making him the holder of the illustrious title. After consulting with her father confessor, Isabelle decided that it was in fact her duty to allow the Prince to sleep with her after all, at least for long enough that she produced an heir who could perpetuate the family name. Maigret discovers that the Prince de V... has died in an accident just days before Saint-Hilaire was shot. These events must be linked, but how? He interviews all the suspects, but Isabelle was at home when the murder occurred, her son was having sex with a prostitute, which he normally did when he visited Paris, and it is inconceivable that the ever-devoted Jacquette could have done it. So who killed Saint-Hilaire?
[spoilers removed]
]]>
The ŷ Recommendation Engine said it, I didn't.]]>
author: Howard Ashman
name: Manny
average rating: 4.29
book published: 1982
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/25
shelves: to-read, donalds-are-trumps, science-fiction, well-i-think-its-funny, why-not-call-it-poetry
review:
The ŷ Recommendation Engine said it, I didn't.
]]>
Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly -- or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project, and then into the Bomb with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers -- Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence, and yon Neumann -- stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight.
Richard Rhodes takes us on that journey step by step, minute by minute, and gives us the definitive story of man's most awesome discovery and invention.]]>
So I'm barely scratching the surface, and I warn you now that if you don't like details, you really won't like this book. Conversely, if, like me, you love details, your only regret will be that there isn't even more of it.
_____________________
How to create a revolutionary new weapons technology in 15 years (abridged)
1. Notice that the atomic weights of many elements seem to be whole numbers, but some are very far from whole numbers. That's weird. Oh, hold on: maybe elements come in more than one kind. Let's, uh, call them isotopes.
2. Notice that in fact even the atomic weights of single isotopes aren't whole numbers. That's weird. Oh, hold on: the excess must be the stuff that holds the nucleus together. Let's, uh, call it the binding energy.
3. Notice that the binding energy isn't uniform. That's weird. Hm, well then, in theory you might generate energy if you could convert one kind of nucleus into another. It works with naturally radioactive elements. But obviously you can't go further than that.
4. Notice that when you do certain kinds of bombardment of elements, there's this radiation produced which seems to be directional. That's weird. Ah, wait: maybe there's more than just electrons and protons in atoms? If there were also a neutral particle with about the mass of a proton, that could explain what we're seeing. Let's call it a neutron.
5. Notice that certain kinds of bombardment, particularly with neutrons, create products that are very different from the element being bombarded, and in fact seem much lighter. That's weird. But I have an idea: maybe the nuclei are splitting up into smaller pieces? I can't think of a better explanation. Let's call this fission.
6. So, hm, you do this fission thing with the neutron bombardment, and there's this binding energy mismatch, so in theory you could create quite a lot of energy by bombarding the right element with neutrons! But in practice it obviously won't work.
7. Wait wait wait! I have an idea. Suppose you could find an element which not only fissioned when you bombarded it with neutrons, but also produced more neutrons? Then you'd get that thing chemists talk about, what's it called? A chain reaction I think. That could create a weapon of stupendous power, like in that old H.G. Wells novel I once read. Let's try and find a suitable element.
8. Damn. I've tried dozens of elements and none of them do the job. False alarm.
9. Sorry! Cancel that. Uranium looks like it might work. Need to look at it more carefully.
10. Well, this is annoying. It does work, but as they say the devil is in the detail. You can get chain reactions with both slow neutrons and fast neutrons. Slow neutrons work fine, you could use that for a power plant. But for a bomb, we need a fast neutron chain reaction. That only works with the rare uranium isotope U-235, which makes up less than 1% of natural uranium, the rest being U-238. And there's no way to separate it out, short of converting half your country into a uranium separation facility. So near, and yet so far!
11. OMG. Germany, under the leadership of an evil dictator, is in the process of conquering Europe. They have good physicists who understand the science. If they can build this, let's call it an atomic bomb, we'll all be toast.
12. We'd better convince the president that the US needs to get there first. Let's enlist the leading scientific mind of the 20th century to explain it to him.
13. Yay! The president bought the story. Well, sort of. He's arranged for us to get some uranium and a few hundred thousand dollars to do experiments and see if a chain reaction is possible. Unfortunately it turns out that we also need super-pure graphite, and we've got an idiot bureaucrat in charge of us. But we do have half of the world's best nuclear physicists on the team, so press on!
14. Wow. After a lot of tinkering, our, uh, nuclear pile (as we've decided to call it), does indeed create a chain reaction. But only with slow neutrons, since we're using natural uranium. To make a bomb, like I said, we need fast neutron fission, and that needs U-235. Let's go back to the president.
15. Yay again! The president says sure, turn half the country into a uranium separation facility and here's a blank check. Oh, and we'll put a new military guy in charge. He's a complete asshole but has a track record of getting things done.
16. How are we going to separate out the U-235? There are four or five things that could work. Well, we'd better try all of them at once. Luckily we've got that blank check.
17. Serendipity strikes again! We find our atomic pile is creating a new radioactive element (we're calling it plutonium - cool, huh?) which can also create a fast neutron chain reaction, so would be suitable for a bomb! And since it's a different element you can separate it using chemical methods, which is much easier. Let's compress three years of research into a few weeks and figure things out - it's great having several dozen bona fide geniuses working for us!
18. Well, I won't bore you with the details of our uranium separation saga. It's been a nightmare. But by ingeniously combining several different methods (lucky that we decided to do all of them), we've kinda got it working. We're producing literally grams of U-235 a day now, it's all coming together! And then there's the plutonium track as well.
19. Okay, we've more or less got the U-235 and plutonium sorted out. In parallel, we've got the problem of actually building the bomb. We need to bring the fissionable material together into the thing we call the critical mass really quickly, like in a millisecond or so. Otherwise we won't get much of a result.
20. We could set things up so that we fire a U-235 bullet at a U-235 target. That will work, but it's not the best solution. Really we want to create an symmetrical implosion that will force the fissionable material together with maximum efficiency.
21. Hm, it turns out that symmetrical implosions are technically rather difficult. And there's virtually no established science to build on. But why don't we ask the greatest mathematician of the age to help us? He'll be able to solve the fundamental problems quickly so that we understand how to build this thing we've just invented called an explosive lens.
22. Oh wow, we have everything in place! Time to test it.
23. BANG!!!!!!
24. Jesus Christ, that was incredible. It really works! Now the politicians and the military have to decide which Japanese city to drop it on.
25. Kyoto? Why not Kyoto? I wanted Kyoto. These civilians and their pathetic objections. Alright, alright, Hiroshima then. If you insist. And then Nagasaki next.
26. Whoopee! We killed fifty thousand innocent women and children in a split second! And then fifty thousand more slowly dying in the most horrible way imaginable over the next few weeks. Sorry, did I say innocent? They were all part of the war effort, obviously enemy combatants. Book a table for dinner at the town's best restaurant, we're celebrating!
27. Japan has capitulated, what a success! But this atom bomb is small potatoes. We need to get started on the hydrogen bomb, it's clearly possible.]]>
author: Richard Rhodes
name: Manny
average rating: 4.38
book published: 1986
rating: 5
read at: 2024/11/15
date added: 2024/11/19
shelves: history-and-biography, science, not-the-whole-truth
review:
I am being sarcastically criticised (you know who you are) for including too many details in this review. Note that each bullet point below represents about thirty pages of text; large pages, narrow margins, smallish font.
So I'm barely scratching the surface, and I warn you now that if you don't like details, you really won't like this book. Conversely, if, like me, you love details, your only regret will be that there isn't even more of it.
_____________________
How to create a revolutionary new weapons technology in 15 years (abridged)
1. Notice that the atomic weights of many elements seem to be whole numbers, but some are very far from whole numbers. That's weird. Oh, hold on: maybe elements come in more than one kind. Let's, uh, call them isotopes.
2. Notice that in fact even the atomic weights of single isotopes aren't whole numbers. That's weird. Oh, hold on: the excess must be the stuff that holds the nucleus together. Let's, uh, call it the binding energy.
3. Notice that the binding energy isn't uniform. That's weird. Hm, well then, in theory you might generate energy if you could convert one kind of nucleus into another. It works with naturally radioactive elements. But obviously you can't go further than that.
4. Notice that when you do certain kinds of bombardment of elements, there's this radiation produced which seems to be directional. That's weird. Ah, wait: maybe there's more than just electrons and protons in atoms? If there were also a neutral particle with about the mass of a proton, that could explain what we're seeing. Let's call it a neutron.
5. Notice that certain kinds of bombardment, particularly with neutrons, create products that are very different from the element being bombarded, and in fact seem much lighter. That's weird. But I have an idea: maybe the nuclei are splitting up into smaller pieces? I can't think of a better explanation. Let's call this fission.
6. So, hm, you do this fission thing with the neutron bombardment, and there's this binding energy mismatch, so in theory you could create quite a lot of energy by bombarding the right element with neutrons! But in practice it obviously won't work.
7. Wait wait wait! I have an idea. Suppose you could find an element which not only fissioned when you bombarded it with neutrons, but also produced more neutrons? Then you'd get that thing chemists talk about, what's it called? A chain reaction I think. That could create a weapon of stupendous power, like in that old H.G. Wells novel I once read. Let's try and find a suitable element.
8. Damn. I've tried dozens of elements and none of them do the job. False alarm.
9. Sorry! Cancel that. Uranium looks like it might work. Need to look at it more carefully.
10. Well, this is annoying. It does work, but as they say the devil is in the detail. You can get chain reactions with both slow neutrons and fast neutrons. Slow neutrons work fine, you could use that for a power plant. But for a bomb, we need a fast neutron chain reaction. That only works with the rare uranium isotope U-235, which makes up less than 1% of natural uranium, the rest being U-238. And there's no way to separate it out, short of converting half your country into a uranium separation facility. So near, and yet so far!
11. OMG. Germany, under the leadership of an evil dictator, is in the process of conquering Europe. They have good physicists who understand the science. If they can build this, let's call it an atomic bomb, we'll all be toast.
12. We'd better convince the president that the US needs to get there first. Let's enlist the leading scientific mind of the 20th century to explain it to him.
13. Yay! The president bought the story. Well, sort of. He's arranged for us to get some uranium and a few hundred thousand dollars to do experiments and see if a chain reaction is possible. Unfortunately it turns out that we also need super-pure graphite, and we've got an idiot bureaucrat in charge of us. But we do have half of the world's best nuclear physicists on the team, so press on!
14. Wow. After a lot of tinkering, our, uh, nuclear pile (as we've decided to call it), does indeed create a chain reaction. But only with slow neutrons, since we're using natural uranium. To make a bomb, like I said, we need fast neutron fission, and that needs U-235. Let's go back to the president.
15. Yay again! The president says sure, turn half the country into a uranium separation facility and here's a blank check. Oh, and we'll put a new military guy in charge. He's a complete asshole but has a track record of getting things done.
16. How are we going to separate out the U-235? There are four or five things that could work. Well, we'd better try all of them at once. Luckily we've got that blank check.
17. Serendipity strikes again! We find our atomic pile is creating a new radioactive element (we're calling it plutonium - cool, huh?) which can also create a fast neutron chain reaction, so would be suitable for a bomb! And since it's a different element you can separate it using chemical methods, which is much easier. Let's compress three years of research into a few weeks and figure things out - it's great having several dozen bona fide geniuses working for us!
18. Well, I won't bore you with the details of our uranium separation saga. It's been a nightmare. But by ingeniously combining several different methods (lucky that we decided to do all of them), we've kinda got it working. We're producing literally grams of U-235 a day now, it's all coming together! And then there's the plutonium track as well.
19. Okay, we've more or less got the U-235 and plutonium sorted out. In parallel, we've got the problem of actually building the bomb. We need to bring the fissionable material together into the thing we call the critical mass really quickly, like in a millisecond or so. Otherwise we won't get much of a result.
20. We could set things up so that we fire a U-235 bullet at a U-235 target. That will work, but it's not the best solution. Really we want to create an symmetrical implosion that will force the fissionable material together with maximum efficiency.
21. Hm, it turns out that symmetrical implosions are technically rather difficult. And there's virtually no established science to build on. But why don't we ask the greatest mathematician of the age to help us? He'll be able to solve the fundamental problems quickly so that we understand how to build this thing we've just invented called an explosive lens.
22. Oh wow, we have everything in place! Time to test it.
23. BANG!!!!!!
24. Jesus Christ, that was incredible. It really works! Now the politicians and the military have to decide which Japanese city to drop it on.
25. Kyoto? Why not Kyoto? I wanted Kyoto. These civilians and their pathetic objections. Alright, alright, Hiroshima then. If you insist. And then Nagasaki next.
26. Whoopee! We killed fifty thousand innocent women and children in a split second! And then fifty thousand more slowly dying in the most horrible way imaginable over the next few weeks. Sorry, did I say innocent? They were all part of the war effort, obviously enemy combatants. Book a table for dinner at the town's best restaurant, we're celebrating!
27. Japan has capitulated, what a success! But this atom bomb is small potatoes. We need to get started on the hydrogen bomb, it's clearly possible.
]]>
In the United States, teenagers can focus on one task for only sixty-five seconds at a time, and office workers average only three minutes. Like so many of us, Johann Hari was finding that constantly switching from device to device and tab to tab was a diminishing and depressing way to live. He tried all sorts of self-help solutions--even abandoning his phone for three months--but nothing seemed to work. So Hari went on an epic journey across the world to interview the leading experts on human attention--and he discovered that everything we think we know about this crisis is wrong.
We think our inability to focus is a personal failure to exert enough willpower over our devices. The truth is even more disturbing: our focus has been stolen by powerful external forces that have left us uniquely vulnerable to corporations determined to raid our attention for profit. Hari found that there are twelve deep causes of this crisis, from the decline of mind-wandering to rising pollution, all of which have robbed some of our attention. In Stolen Focus, he introduces readers to Silicon Valley dissidents who learned to hack human attention, and veterinarians who diagnose dogs with ADHD. He explores a favela in Rio de Janeiro where everyone lost their attention in a particularly surreal way, and an office in New Zealand that discovered a remarkable technique to restore workers' productivity.
Crucially, Hari learned how we can reclaim our focus--as individuals, and as a society--if we are determined to fight for it. Stolen Focus will transform the debate about attention and finally show us how to get it back.]]>
author: Johann Hari
name: Manny
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2022
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: not-to-read
review:
]]>
A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium.
Drawing deeply on this research, this book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us—her beloved readers—to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Wolf raises difficult questions, including:
Will children learn to incorporate the full range of "deep reading" processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain?
Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves?
With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know?
Will all these influences, in turn, change the formation in children and the use in adults of "slower" cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives?
Will the chain of digital influences ultimately influence the use of the critical analytical and empathic capacities necessary for a democratic society?
How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain?
Who are the "good readers" of every epoch?
Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children—Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become, inevitably, increasingly dependent on screens.
Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, technology, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.]]>
Maryanne Wolf is an expert on reading and literacy who's been studying the issues for a long time from both practical and theoretical angles. She argues persuasively that digital media is having a much larger effect on us than we realise: people are losing the ability to read in a deep and engaged way, and many dangerous things are associated with that shift. Your first reaction might be that her claims are exaggerated (surely it can't be that bad?) or elitist (people's reading tastes have always changed over time, who cares if no one wants to read Proust any more?)
But it seems to be rather worse than a reluctance to read Proust. Wolf starts off by reminding us of a critical difference between listening and reading. We are biologically programmed to pick up spoken language just from being around people who talk, and almost all children do that automatically; it's been that way for many tens of thousands of years, perhaps longer. But reading is a very recent addition to our repertoire, and it's not innate. If people aren't taught how to read, they usually can't do it. It's a skill that's correspondingly easy to lose.
Since, until recently, it was taken for granted that almost all educated people would read, and that the people who couldn't read would generally want to, it's also easy to underestimate how important reading is to our culture. It teaches us to concentrate our attention and memory; less obviously, I was interested to see Wolf focussing on the idea that it teaches us empathy. We read fiction and we identify with the characters in the book, who may be very different from us. That makes us more inclined to try to understand a larger range of people on their own terms. They may be different, but our reading suggests to us that different people may also be admirable in their own way. Not least, careful reading helps us build us a common world-view that we share with all the other people who've read the books we appreciated.
None of this is more than suggestive on its own, but it does give a framework for making sense of what we see around us. Starting with data measurable with standard psychological tests, Wolf says that studies over the last couple of decades show dramatic declines in working memory (no longer "seven plus or minus two", but now more like "four plus or minus one"), average attention span (down from ten minutes to five), and empathy (reduced by 40%). It's harder to pin down, and she doesn't talk about it explicitly, but I receive the strong impression that people are more likely to believe things that obviously are not true. It is still astonishing to me that QAnon could be taken seriously by a large proportion of the US population; even Flat Earthism, once a synonym for gullibility and idiocy, has acquired a substantial following. If people don't read properly, they fail to acquire a stable frame of reference. And people are not reading. Wolf cites more studies showing that two-thirds of all US fourth-graders cannot read proficiently. If you haven't reached proficiency by then, the rest of your education is unlikely to yield results.
As you can see, I found this material, which takes up the first half of the book, extremely interesting. In the second half, Wolf suggests fixes, organised around the idea of helping children to strike a happy balance between print books and digital media. I was less impressed by this. It sounded like good advice for prosperous upper middle class parents who want their children to thrive, but these are not the key demographic; it seems unlikely that it will help children from poorer families. I would say that much more radical measures are needed. Australia is currenting mooting a social media ban for children under 16, with the platform providers responsible for enforcing the rules. If that succeeds, it could be a substantial step in the right direction, but I wonder if it's actually feasible.
As other reviewers have pointed out, the book is written in a way that sometimes comes across as a bit annoying. I am not crazy either about Wolf's skills as a prose stylist. But she has her heart in the right place, and she knows a great deal about these vital questions, so I wasn't bothered. It's couple of hundred pages and doesn't take long to get through. I strongly recommend looking at it.
A final thought that came to me while I was writing this review. I have often wondered who the mysterious "elites" are that Donald Trump teaches his followers to oppose. It didn't seem to make any sense. He's a billionaire, most of them are poor. What do they have in common? Who are the "elites" they both hate so much?
I think they are [spoilers removed]]]>
author: Maryanne Wolf
name: Manny
average rating: 3.97
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2024/11/17
date added: 2024/11/18
shelves: science, life-is-proust
review:
I've seen a lot of speculation about the bad effect that smartphones and social media might be having on people's thinking; the other day, I asked clever o1-preview if it could recommend anything which looked at it in more depth, and this book was top of its list. I've just finished it; Reader, Come Home doesn't answer all my questions, but it's better than anything else I've seen so far and agrees well with my own informal observations. Thank you, o1-preview!
Maryanne Wolf is an expert on reading and literacy who's been studying the issues for a long time from both practical and theoretical angles. She argues persuasively that digital media is having a much larger effect on us than we realise: people are losing the ability to read in a deep and engaged way, and many dangerous things are associated with that shift. Your first reaction might be that her claims are exaggerated (surely it can't be that bad?) or elitist (people's reading tastes have always changed over time, who cares if no one wants to read Proust any more?)
But it seems to be rather worse than a reluctance to read Proust. Wolf starts off by reminding us of a critical difference between listening and reading. We are biologically programmed to pick up spoken language just from being around people who talk, and almost all children do that automatically; it's been that way for many tens of thousands of years, perhaps longer. But reading is a very recent addition to our repertoire, and it's not innate. If people aren't taught how to read, they usually can't do it. It's a skill that's correspondingly easy to lose.
Since, until recently, it was taken for granted that almost all educated people would read, and that the people who couldn't read would generally want to, it's also easy to underestimate how important reading is to our culture. It teaches us to concentrate our attention and memory; less obviously, I was interested to see Wolf focussing on the idea that it teaches us empathy. We read fiction and we identify with the characters in the book, who may be very different from us. That makes us more inclined to try to understand a larger range of people on their own terms. They may be different, but our reading suggests to us that different people may also be admirable in their own way. Not least, careful reading helps us build us a common world-view that we share with all the other people who've read the books we appreciated.
None of this is more than suggestive on its own, but it does give a framework for making sense of what we see around us. Starting with data measurable with standard psychological tests, Wolf says that studies over the last couple of decades show dramatic declines in working memory (no longer "seven plus or minus two", but now more like "four plus or minus one"), average attention span (down from ten minutes to five), and empathy (reduced by 40%). It's harder to pin down, and she doesn't talk about it explicitly, but I receive the strong impression that people are more likely to believe things that obviously are not true. It is still astonishing to me that QAnon could be taken seriously by a large proportion of the US population; even Flat Earthism, once a synonym for gullibility and idiocy, has acquired a substantial following. If people don't read properly, they fail to acquire a stable frame of reference. And people are not reading. Wolf cites more studies showing that two-thirds of all US fourth-graders cannot read proficiently. If you haven't reached proficiency by then, the rest of your education is unlikely to yield results.
As you can see, I found this material, which takes up the first half of the book, extremely interesting. In the second half, Wolf suggests fixes, organised around the idea of helping children to strike a happy balance between print books and digital media. I was less impressed by this. It sounded like good advice for prosperous upper middle class parents who want their children to thrive, but these are not the key demographic; it seems unlikely that it will help children from poorer families. I would say that much more radical measures are needed. Australia is currenting mooting a social media ban for children under 16, with the platform providers responsible for enforcing the rules. If that succeeds, it could be a substantial step in the right direction, but I wonder if it's actually feasible.
As other reviewers have pointed out, the book is written in a way that sometimes comes across as a bit annoying. I am not crazy either about Wolf's skills as a prose stylist. But she has her heart in the right place, and she knows a great deal about these vital questions, so I wasn't bothered. It's couple of hundred pages and doesn't take long to get through. I strongly recommend looking at it.
A final thought that came to me while I was writing this review. I have often wondered who the mysterious "elites" are that Donald Trump teaches his followers to oppose. It didn't seem to make any sense. He's a billionaire, most of them are poor. What do they have in common? Who are the "elites" they both hate so much?
I think they are [spoilers removed]
]]>
author: Auralie Vierge
name: Manny
average rating: 3.17
book published: 2012
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/13
shelves: to-read
review:
I knew it was only a matter of time before
]]>
It is my intent to give the reader simple reference material to help them grow closer in their relationship with God as well as giving them a tool to allow them to share and defend their faith.]]>
author: Ryan Price
name: Manny
average rating: 0.0
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/11/12
shelves: to-read
review:
Once I realised that this book had to exist, it only took me ten seconds to find it.
]]>
author: Margaret George
name: Manny
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1998
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/31
date added: 2024/11/07
shelves: history-and-biography, older-men-younger-women, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts
review:
Single mother, 25, brunette, slim, attractive, cute nose, GSOH, speaks eight languages, queen in her own right, legally a goddess WLTM man, 35-50, independently wealthy, fluent in Greek and Latin, outstanding athlete, swordsman, equestrian and general, for LTR. Ideally you will be the ruler of the known world but I'm prepared to trade down a bit if necessary, my friends always say I'm a realist! Send a papyrus with details of military campaigns, captured slaves, triumphs and deathless prose works to [email protected], attaching a comprehensive genealogical tree with divine ancestors highlighted in gold and a recent nude statue. No time wasters please.
]]>
Apostrophes are a pain. The rules about how to use them are complicated, and have evolved haphazardly. Originally written as advice by a copywriter for designers � wont to insert and remove apostrophes at will, for visual effect � this is a light-hearted pocket-sized guide to getting the things right.
Simon Griffin lets off steam so that we don’t have to, showing precisely why ‘Rhianna and Jennifer’s photos were all over the internet� is quite different to ‘Rhianna’s and Jennifer’s photos� or what words apostrophes are replacing in sentences such as ‘He’d like you to buy him some cocaine�, or ‘They’ve got it all on camera.�
Elegantly produced, this is the perfect gift for any pedant, as well as an indispensable guide in all our moments of grammar-related frustration.
]]>
I was minding my own fucking business this afternoon down at , leafing through this book and it's amusing comments on the most treacherous punctuation mark in the English language, when I was rudely interrupted by a person who's name I will not fucking mention, though it could possibly have been Nots.
"Its inappropriate to read the stock without paying for it," she primly admonished me, in the tone of someone quoting one of Jesus's lesser-known moral precepts, together with further unwanted advice about minding my Ps and Qs when visiting bookseller's establishments.
I guiltily put it down and hoped I hadn't been spotted. Fuck!
___________________
[Update, Oct 30 2024]
From today's Guardian:
Biden’s comment came during a zoom call with Voto Latino, in which Biden referred to Hinchcliffe’s comments and said the Puerto Ricans he knows are “good, decent, honorable, people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s � his � his demonization of things is unconscionable, and it’s un-American, and it’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done.� But it wasn’t entirely clear whether he had said the singular “supporter’s� or the plural “supporters�, describing Trump’s base more broadly.So it turns out that the fate of the world may depend on a fucking apostrophe.]]>
author: Simon Griffin
name: Manny
average rating: 4.23
book published: 2015
rating: 3
read at: 2016/11/06
date added: 2024/10/29
shelves: linguistics-and-philosophy, not-the-whole-truth, well-i-think-its-funny
review:
[Original review, Nov 6 2016]
I was minding my own fucking business this afternoon down at , leafing through this book and it's amusing comments on the most treacherous punctuation mark in the English language, when I was rudely interrupted by a person who's name I will not fucking mention, though it could possibly have been Nots.
"Its inappropriate to read the stock without paying for it," she primly admonished me, in the tone of someone quoting one of Jesus's lesser-known moral precepts, together with further unwanted advice about minding my Ps and Qs when visiting bookseller's establishments.
I guiltily put it down and hoped I hadn't been spotted. Fuck!
___________________
[Update, Oct 30 2024]
From today's Guardian:
Biden’s comment came during a zoom call with Voto Latino, in which Biden referred to Hinchcliffe’s comments and said the Puerto Ricans he knows are “good, decent, honorable, people. The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporter’s � his � his demonization of things is unconscionable, and it’s un-American, and it’s totally contrary to everything we’ve done.� But it wasn’t entirely clear whether he had said the singular “supporter’s� or the plural “supporters�, describing Trump’s base more broadly.So it turns out that the fate of the world may depend on a fucking apostrophe.
]]>
"Hi. I'm Vikki. Sorry, what did you say your name was? So noisy in here you can't hear a thing. Ed. Got it. Nice to meet you, Ed! What? Oh, I'm a model. Glamor. Thanks! Well, if you've walked past the men's magazine section this week, then you will have. Front cover of Loaded. Really? Hey, that's sweet. No, I mean it. You're really nice. Oh, alright then. Would you believe it, stockings and a honey-pot. That was it. Yes, I do actually. Love it. Have it for breakfast every morning. Guess that's why the shot came out so well. Me and a honey-pot... I didn't even notice the camera. I know, it sounds silly. Yes, the runny kind, that's my favorite too. Get out! Really? OK, OK, let's hear your honey story. Sorry? You actually climbed up the tree to get it? That's awesome. OMG. What, how high were you? Jesus Christ. You didn't break anything? You know, you're a lot tougher than you look. I love the way you said that. Can't stand these macho types. Oh, go on, tell me another one. OK... OK... a what trap? A Hefner lump? Sorry, just too noisy. Never mind, what happened next? Hey, I do that too! I know, once you've started you just can't stop. You're the first person I've ever met who understands. You what?? You actually got your head stuck in it?! Ha! Oh, you are totally cracking me up, I love this story! Ha! Ha! I'm sorry about your friend though, I hope he recovered. It's funny, I just feel so relaxed with you. It's like I've known you for ages. Since I was a little girl in fact. Oh, I see everyone's starting to leave. Look, I know this sounds crazy, like we've only just met and I'll probably regret it in the morning, but come home with me. Um, well, yes and no. I just... I just want to hold you. All night. You do? You really do understand? Ed, I can't believe this. It feels like fate. I'm so happy I met you. OK, let me get my coat. We're outta here."
___________________________________________
If you want to examine the magazine cover which inspired the review, note that, as the review suggests, it's in dubious taste, and features a mostly naked woman. If that kind of thing offends you, don't look at it! Otherwise, it's at
]]>
author: A.A. Milne
name: Manny
average rating: 4.37
book published: 1928
rating: 5
read at: 1965/01/01
date added: 2024/10/28
shelves: children, strongly-recommended, well-i-think-its-funny, story-review, flagged
review:
Winnie the Pooh and the Cocktail Party
"Hi. I'm Vikki. Sorry, what did you say your name was? So noisy in here you can't hear a thing. Ed. Got it. Nice to meet you, Ed! What? Oh, I'm a model. Glamor. Thanks! Well, if you've walked past the men's magazine section this week, then you will have. Front cover of Loaded. Really? Hey, that's sweet. No, I mean it. You're really nice. Oh, alright then. Would you believe it, stockings and a honey-pot. That was it. Yes, I do actually. Love it. Have it for breakfast every morning. Guess that's why the shot came out so well. Me and a honey-pot... I didn't even notice the camera. I know, it sounds silly. Yes, the runny kind, that's my favorite too. Get out! Really? OK, OK, let's hear your honey story. Sorry? You actually climbed up the tree to get it? That's awesome. OMG. What, how high were you? Jesus Christ. You didn't break anything? You know, you're a lot tougher than you look. I love the way you said that. Can't stand these macho types. Oh, go on, tell me another one. OK... OK... a what trap? A Hefner lump? Sorry, just too noisy. Never mind, what happened next? Hey, I do that too! I know, once you've started you just can't stop. You're the first person I've ever met who understands. You what?? You actually got your head stuck in it?! Ha! Oh, you are totally cracking me up, I love this story! Ha! Ha! I'm sorry about your friend though, I hope he recovered. It's funny, I just feel so relaxed with you. It's like I've known you for ages. Since I was a little girl in fact. Oh, I see everyone's starting to leave. Look, I know this sounds crazy, like we've only just met and I'll probably regret it in the morning, but come home with me. Um, well, yes and no. I just... I just want to hold you. All night. You do? You really do understand? Ed, I can't believe this. It feels like fate. I'm so happy I met you. OK, let me get my coat. We're outta here."
___________________________________________
If you want to examine the magazine cover which inspired the review, note that, as the review suggests, it's in dubious taste, and features a mostly naked woman. If that kind of thing offends you, don't look at it! Otherwise, it's at
]]>
Look at thisss, hobbitses! Not bought at flea market for ten francses. Catalogue says worth seven hundred dollarses. Oh yes, Not knows about bookses, gollum. But can't touch, can't read, she says too valuable. Going to eat fish instead, but nice birthday present, oh yes precious.
]]>
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Manny
average rating: 4.63
book published: 1954
rating: 5
read at: 2013/06/19
date added: 2024/10/24
shelves: not-the-whole-truth
review:
Look at thisss, hobbitses! Not bought at flea market for ten francses. Catalogue says worth seven hundred dollarses. Oh yes, Not knows about bookses, gollum. But can't touch, can't read, she says too valuable. Going to eat fish instead, but nice birthday present, oh yes precious.
]]>
Two fugitives, a man and a child, drive all night across a stony desert. As dawn breaks, they roll into an abandoned mine site. From the vehicle they survey a forsaken place � middens of twisted iron, rusty wire, piles of sun-baked trash. They’re exhausted, traumatised, desperate now. But as a refuge, this is the most promising place they’ve seen. The child peers at the field of desolation. The man thinks to himself, this could work.
Problem is, they’re not alone.
So begins a searing, propulsive journey through a life whose central challenge is not simply a matter of survival, but of how to maintain human decency as everyone around you falls ever further into barbarism.]]>
Graves evidently did a huge amount of research concerning Civil War England, and Winton has done just as much on the probable effects of climate change. Two themes stand out. First, he does a fantastic job of conveying what things will be like a few generations from now if we carry on with business as usual. It won't be Mad Max gangs stalking a barren wasteland. People are ingenious and adaptable, and even if conditions are very harsh they find ways to cope. The book is full of minutely detailed descriptions of post-climate-apocalypse life which often reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's just taken for granted that you have to live underground for the summer months, that even if you always wear maximal sunblock you'll get skin cancers, that you spend all of your time trying to get spare parts to keep functional your solar panels, grow sheds and electric vehicles, that you need well-prepared defences against the inevitable cyclones. Things slowly get worse, but as usual people are reluctant to admit it. Life is hard, suck it up.
The second theme which gives the book power is the degree of hatred felt for the organisations and individuals who caused the world to become like this, in particular the large fossil fuel companies. Most of the future-world citizens never think about it; they have no interest in history or politics. But there is a secret network that has not forgotten, and they remorselessly hunt down and kill the descendants of the people who ran Aramco and BP and Shell, and their enablers and helpers. Winton denies it in interviews, which he probably has to, but it seems to me that the message is clear: rather than killing them two hundred years from now, when it's too late to do any good, wouldn't it be better to kill them now? They are the worst kinds of criminals, ruining the planet permanently so that they can enjoy lives of luxury today.
There's another theme I can't go into without dropping major spoilers. Winton apparently spent seven years writing Juice, and my impression is that he decided halfway through that he needed to change the plot to reflect things that had happened meanwhile. I was also a bit unhappy about the Scheherazade-like framing device, and I found the twist near the end rather unnecessary. So structurally I suppose the novel could be stronger, but what the hell, if you finish a five hundred page book in two and a half days then it must have a lot going for it. Check this out if you want a concrete picture of what climate change means in human terms.]]>
author: Tim Winton
name: Manny
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/21
date added: 2024/10/21
shelves: australia, science-fiction
review:
Tim Winton's new novel Juice has odd commonalities with Robert Graves's Wife to Mr Milton, which I read last week. I found both books unputdownable for similar reasons: they do such a good job of transporting you into the world they describe, and they convey such a strong sense of moral indignation. In Wife to Mr Milton, the indignation is about the plight of women in a patriarchal society. In Juice, it's about the plight of everyone in a capitalist society.
Graves evidently did a huge amount of research concerning Civil War England, and Winton has done just as much on the probable effects of climate change. Two themes stand out. First, he does a fantastic job of conveying what things will be like a few generations from now if we carry on with business as usual. It won't be Mad Max gangs stalking a barren wasteland. People are ingenious and adaptable, and even if conditions are very harsh they find ways to cope. The book is full of minutely detailed descriptions of post-climate-apocalypse life which often reminded me of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It's just taken for granted that you have to live underground for the summer months, that even if you always wear maximal sunblock you'll get skin cancers, that you spend all of your time trying to get spare parts to keep functional your solar panels, grow sheds and electric vehicles, that you need well-prepared defences against the inevitable cyclones. Things slowly get worse, but as usual people are reluctant to admit it. Life is hard, suck it up.
The second theme which gives the book power is the degree of hatred felt for the organisations and individuals who caused the world to become like this, in particular the large fossil fuel companies. Most of the future-world citizens never think about it; they have no interest in history or politics. But there is a secret network that has not forgotten, and they remorselessly hunt down and kill the descendants of the people who ran Aramco and BP and Shell, and their enablers and helpers. Winton denies it in interviews, which he probably has to, but it seems to me that the message is clear: rather than killing them two hundred years from now, when it's too late to do any good, wouldn't it be better to kill them now? They are the worst kinds of criminals, ruining the planet permanently so that they can enjoy lives of luxury today.
There's another theme I can't go into without dropping major spoilers. Winton apparently spent seven years writing Juice, and my impression is that he decided halfway through that he needed to change the plot to reflect things that had happened meanwhile. I was also a bit unhappy about the Scheherazade-like framing device, and I found the twist near the end rather unnecessary. So structurally I suppose the novel could be stronger, but what the hell, if you finish a five hundred page book in two and a half days then it must have a lot going for it. Check this out if you want a concrete picture of what climate change means in human terms.
]]>
Graves provides a sympathetic portrait of the witty and intelligent young woman whose marriage to the Puritan writer John Milton was marked by his domineering personality and refusal to acknowledge her talents.--price grabber.com]]>
Yes, I know that sounds impossible. Check it out yourself if you don't believe me.]]>
author: Robert Graves
name: Manny
average rating: 2.50
book published: 1943
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/16
date added: 2024/10/17
shelves: history-and-biography, older-men-younger-women, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, transcendent-experiences, well-i-think-its-funny
review:
If this book, word for word, had been written by Margaret Atwood and published in 1992, it would have two hundred thousand ratings and already be acclaimed as one of the great feminist novels of the twentieth century. It would have had all of Atwood's trademark wit, passion and irony, though her readers might have been slightly surprised to discover that she was also a talented historian who'd spent some time learning how to produce credible seventeenth century English. Unfortunately, since it was in fact written by Robert Graves and published in 1942, it has two hundred ratings and hardly anyone's even heard of it.
Yes, I know that sounds impossible. Check it out yourself if you don't believe me.
]]>
My Icelandic adventure passes another milestone. The first three books I read were all stories I already knew - Le petit prince, Alice in Wonderland, and a collection of traditional fairy tales - but this was the real thing: a book I'd never even heard of before, originally written in Icelandic. I don't want to make exaggerated claims; it's about 80 pages long, with a couple of easy sentences per page and plenty of pictures, and I'd say the intended reader would be about five to seven years old. But all the same.
To my surprise, it turned out to be a very good story. Over the last few months, we've watched a bunch of Icelandic movies, and we've come to recognise the style: bleak, uncompromising, closely based on the eternal themes of love, suffering, honour, death. Tína fer í frí was more of the same, in a miniature format. The eponymous heroine, who looks like she's about seven, is invited to go and spend a few days with her aunt, who lives in the next town. What makes it super-special is that, for the first time ever, she's going to go all on her own! Her mom will put her on the bus, the bus driver, whom they both know well (Iceland seems to be one big family) will make sure she gets off at the right stop, and aunt Elsa will be there to meet her. What an adventure!
Even better, there's a boy, somewhat confusingly called Bói, who'll be coming on the same bus. He's in Tína's class at school, and there is an unstated implication that Tína is just a little keen on him. But when she gets on, she finds that it's more complicated than she'd bargained for: Bói has brought his kid sister Rósa, who's just four and managed to talk her way into tagging along. I am kind of amazed that a parent would send off a four year old with only a seven year old to look after her, but Icelanders are tough people.
As it turns out, Rósa needs a whole lot of looking after and Bói totally isn't up to the demands of the situation. First, she unwisely eats a banana and then gets travel-sick. She's making weird noises and holding her hand over her mouth. Bói has no idea what's going on, but Tína sometimes gets travel-sick too and immediately figures out what the deal is. She takes everything out of her paper lunch bag and holds it up to the kid's face. Little Rósa gratefully throws up into it. The driver has meanwhile been alerted and pulls over. He comes back to find out what's going on, and compliments the girls on their effective handling of the emergency.
Tína's job as substitute mother isn't finished yet. Later that afternoon, after she's been met by her aunt, they all go over to the fair. There's a lot of fun stuff, ice-cream and a shooting gallery and a tombola. Tína is hanging out at the tombola, waiting to see who's won the first prize (a huge red sofa), when she suddenly notices Rósa. She's on her own, wandering through the crowd with tears streaming down her face. Tína rushes over and grabs her just before she can walk out into the street; a car misses her by inches. Rósa points towards the bus. "I want to go home to Mommy," she sobs. Tína calms her down and takes her over to her brother, who's freaking out. He's so relieved to see the brat again that he buys them all a round of ice-creams.
Tína goes back to her aunt's place. Her friend Anna is there; she's been given permission to sleep over, and the girls have decided that they'll stay up late talking. But Tína is so exhausted by her day that she falls asleep after a few minutes. When she wakes up, she can't figure out where she is. The ceiling is very low, just above her head, and she's trapped. There's something wrapped round her that hardly lets her move. She's about to panic, but she manages to roll over a bit, and then she sees what's happened. Somehow, she's fallen out of bed in the middle of the night and rolled under the bed! The sheet has got wrapped around her.
It's five am, and Anna is still fast asleep, but Tína has to wake her up to tell her about the amazing thing that happened. Anna doesn't look very interested and just grunts. "You do believe me, don't you?" asks Tína. "Sure," says Anna, and goes back to sleep again. Tína is dying to tell her aunt, but responsibly decides to wait until seven. She puts the sheet back on her bed, even though it's a bit crumpled, and lies down, seething with impatience. But after a while she falls asleep too. At eight o'clock, aunt Elsa comes in to wake up the girls. "Did you sleep well?" she asks politely. "Fine!" says Anna. "Let me tell you what happened to me!" says Tína, and comes out with her incredible story. "You just dreamed it," says the sceptical aunt. "But Anna, I woke you up!" says Tína. "Don't you remember?" "I don't remember anything," says Anna. Tína is so disappointed that she almost starts crying.
When they're having breakfast, the phone rings. The aunt takes the call and looks worried. She tells Tína that a neighbor is seriously ill. She needs to go and look after the neighbor's kids. Tína will have to go home earlier than expected. When she takes Tína to the bus stop, they find Bói and little Rósa waiting there. Rósa is too home-sick and needs to go back to her mom. The three kids sit down together. "Do you know what happened to me last night?!" says Tína, and this time no one tells her it was just a dream. She's happy again. She never tells anyone that she saved Rósa's life at the fair. It's not very interesting.
I loved this story.
____________________
[Update, Jan 9 2019]
Working together with of the University of Iceland, who supplied the Icelandic expertise, we've constructed of this story in a much improved version of the LARA framework. Branislav is going to start using it with his Icelandic class next month. Hopefully there will be more LARA-enabled Icelandic text soon.]]>
author: Esther Skriver
name: Manny
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2018/10/25
date added: 2024/10/15
shelves: children, icelandic, well-i-think-its-funny, fun-with-lara
review:
[Original review, Oct 26 2018]
My Icelandic adventure passes another milestone. The first three books I read were all stories I already knew - Le petit prince, Alice in Wonderland, and a collection of traditional fairy tales - but this was the real thing: a book I'd never even heard of before, originally written in Icelandic. I don't want to make exaggerated claims; it's about 80 pages long, with a couple of easy sentences per page and plenty of pictures, and I'd say the intended reader would be about five to seven years old. But all the same.
To my surprise, it turned out to be a very good story. Over the last few months, we've watched a bunch of Icelandic movies, and we've come to recognise the style: bleak, uncompromising, closely based on the eternal themes of love, suffering, honour, death. Tína fer í frí was more of the same, in a miniature format. The eponymous heroine, who looks like she's about seven, is invited to go and spend a few days with her aunt, who lives in the next town. What makes it super-special is that, for the first time ever, she's going to go all on her own! Her mom will put her on the bus, the bus driver, whom they both know well (Iceland seems to be one big family) will make sure she gets off at the right stop, and aunt Elsa will be there to meet her. What an adventure!
Even better, there's a boy, somewhat confusingly called Bói, who'll be coming on the same bus. He's in Tína's class at school, and there is an unstated implication that Tína is just a little keen on him. But when she gets on, she finds that it's more complicated than she'd bargained for: Bói has brought his kid sister Rósa, who's just four and managed to talk her way into tagging along. I am kind of amazed that a parent would send off a four year old with only a seven year old to look after her, but Icelanders are tough people.
As it turns out, Rósa needs a whole lot of looking after and Bói totally isn't up to the demands of the situation. First, she unwisely eats a banana and then gets travel-sick. She's making weird noises and holding her hand over her mouth. Bói has no idea what's going on, but Tína sometimes gets travel-sick too and immediately figures out what the deal is. She takes everything out of her paper lunch bag and holds it up to the kid's face. Little Rósa gratefully throws up into it. The driver has meanwhile been alerted and pulls over. He comes back to find out what's going on, and compliments the girls on their effective handling of the emergency.
Tína's job as substitute mother isn't finished yet. Later that afternoon, after she's been met by her aunt, they all go over to the fair. There's a lot of fun stuff, ice-cream and a shooting gallery and a tombola. Tína is hanging out at the tombola, waiting to see who's won the first prize (a huge red sofa), when she suddenly notices Rósa. She's on her own, wandering through the crowd with tears streaming down her face. Tína rushes over and grabs her just before she can walk out into the street; a car misses her by inches. Rósa points towards the bus. "I want to go home to Mommy," she sobs. Tína calms her down and takes her over to her brother, who's freaking out. He's so relieved to see the brat again that he buys them all a round of ice-creams.
Tína goes back to her aunt's place. Her friend Anna is there; she's been given permission to sleep over, and the girls have decided that they'll stay up late talking. But Tína is so exhausted by her day that she falls asleep after a few minutes. When she wakes up, she can't figure out where she is. The ceiling is very low, just above her head, and she's trapped. There's something wrapped round her that hardly lets her move. She's about to panic, but she manages to roll over a bit, and then she sees what's happened. Somehow, she's fallen out of bed in the middle of the night and rolled under the bed! The sheet has got wrapped around her.
It's five am, and Anna is still fast asleep, but Tína has to wake her up to tell her about the amazing thing that happened. Anna doesn't look very interested and just grunts. "You do believe me, don't you?" asks Tína. "Sure," says Anna, and goes back to sleep again. Tína is dying to tell her aunt, but responsibly decides to wait until seven. She puts the sheet back on her bed, even though it's a bit crumpled, and lies down, seething with impatience. But after a while she falls asleep too. At eight o'clock, aunt Elsa comes in to wake up the girls. "Did you sleep well?" she asks politely. "Fine!" says Anna. "Let me tell you what happened to me!" says Tína, and comes out with her incredible story. "You just dreamed it," says the sceptical aunt. "But Anna, I woke you up!" says Tína. "Don't you remember?" "I don't remember anything," says Anna. Tína is so disappointed that she almost starts crying.
When they're having breakfast, the phone rings. The aunt takes the call and looks worried. She tells Tína that a neighbor is seriously ill. She needs to go and look after the neighbor's kids. Tína will have to go home earlier than expected. When she takes Tína to the bus stop, they find Bói and little Rósa waiting there. Rósa is too home-sick and needs to go back to her mom. The three kids sit down together. "Do you know what happened to me last night?!" says Tína, and this time no one tells her it was just a dream. She's happy again. She never tells anyone that she saved Rósa's life at the fair. It's not very interesting.
I loved this story.
____________________
[Update, Jan 9 2019]
Working together with of the University of Iceland, who supplied the Icelandic expertise, we've constructed of this story in a much improved version of the LARA framework. Branislav is going to start using it with his Icelandic class next month. Hopefully there will be more LARA-enabled Icelandic text soon.
]]>
Gordon Teskey's freshly edited text of Milton's masterpiece is accompanied by a new introduction and substantial explanatory annotations. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized, the latter, importantly, within the limits imposed by Milton's syntax. "Sources and Backgrounds" collects relevant passages from the Bible and Milton's prose writings, including selections from The Reason of Church Government and the full text of Areopagitica. "Criticism" brings together classic interpretations by Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, Victor Hugo, and T. S. Eliot, among others, and the most important recent criticism and scholarship surrounding the epic, including essays by Northrop Frye, Barbara Lewalski, Christopher Ricks, and Helen Vendler. A Glossary and Selected Bibliography are also included.]]>
- So what's it about?
- Both Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss say it's an early work of science-fiction.
- Is it any good?
- Uh...
- Because early science-fiction is often sort of crap.]]>
author: John Milton
name: Manny
average rating: 3.94
book published: 1667
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/12
shelves: to-read, not-the-whole-truth, science-fiction
review:
Conversation with Not, who is still rebelling against her Catholic upbringing by steadfastly refusing to read a single page of the Bible or any related works:
- So what's it about?
- Both Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss say it's an early work of science-fiction.
- Is it any good?
- Uh...
- Because early science-fiction is often sort of crap.
]]>
In his shorter fiction, Dick explores many ideas that would haunt him throughout his writing career. At once philosophical, surreal and strange, his stories have breath-taking scope and might even challenge your perception of reality.
This first volume contains twenty-nine stories, including some of Dick's most formative work, such as 'Beyond Lies the Wub' and 'Second Variety'. Never has there been a better way to experience one of 20th-century literature's most imaginative minds.]]>
I had just started this collection, and it was the first thing that popped into my head. A couple of days later, I started to have misgivings. Maybe I'd been too hasty. But having now finished, I'm inclined to think I was more or less on target. These are stories Dick published when he was still in his early 20s. A few are quite memorable - I would say the standouts were Roog and Beyond Lies the Wub - but most are formulaic 50s pulp SF. Dick is still learning his trade. There are time-travel escapades with the usual kinds of paradoxes, bleak post-apocalyptic numbers where the world has been ravaged by atomic weapons, some extremely implausible space operas.
He comes up with some nice images; I liked the minaturised city in the paperweight from The Crystal Crypt (later, brilliantly satirised in John Sladek's Solar Shoe-Salesman), the Bradburyesque killer cuckoo clock in Beyond the Door, and the clever twist on Leda and the Swan from In the Garden. We see flickers of the themes that would later make him one of the great science-fiction novelists, the paranoia and the plays on the nature of reality, but he is not yet able to make them work properly. In the endnotes, written twenty-five years later, Dick is disarmingly candid about these early efforts and acknowledges the debt he owes to Anthony Boucher, who, he says, taught him how to create a proper story. Going back to where we came in, I felt I was doing the same thing with the AI. "Show, don't tell!" I advised it. "Write what you know!" o1-preview listened attentively, and, as you can see in the report, its fourth draft was a whole lot better than its first. But it's still a beginner.
Now I want to continue educating my enthusiastic silicon protegé. Dick reached maturity in just a few years, and AIs are much quicker than people. Perhaps it might work? Which in itself could be the premise for a typical early PKD short story. I wonder what the twist is?]]>
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Manny
average rating: 4.29
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/11
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves: science-fiction, what-i-do-for-a-living, chat-gpt
review:
Last month, I helped the new OpenAI model o1-preview to write . Casting about for points of comparison, I said in my afterword that it didn't seem unreasonable to compare with early Philip K. Dick; Dick is better, but I would put the AI in the same ballpark.
I had just started this collection, and it was the first thing that popped into my head. A couple of days later, I started to have misgivings. Maybe I'd been too hasty. But having now finished, I'm inclined to think I was more or less on target. These are stories Dick published when he was still in his early 20s. A few are quite memorable - I would say the standouts were Roog and Beyond Lies the Wub - but most are formulaic 50s pulp SF. Dick is still learning his trade. There are time-travel escapades with the usual kinds of paradoxes, bleak post-apocalyptic numbers where the world has been ravaged by atomic weapons, some extremely implausible space operas.
He comes up with some nice images; I liked the minaturised city in the paperweight from The Crystal Crypt (later, brilliantly satirised in John Sladek's Solar Shoe-Salesman), the Bradburyesque killer cuckoo clock in Beyond the Door, and the clever twist on Leda and the Swan from In the Garden. We see flickers of the themes that would later make him one of the great science-fiction novelists, the paranoia and the plays on the nature of reality, but he is not yet able to make them work properly. In the endnotes, written twenty-five years later, Dick is disarmingly candid about these early efforts and acknowledges the debt he owes to Anthony Boucher, who, he says, taught him how to create a proper story. Going back to where we came in, I felt I was doing the same thing with the AI. "Show, don't tell!" I advised it. "Write what you know!" o1-preview listened attentively, and, as you can see in the report, its fourth draft was a whole lot better than its first. But it's still a beginner.
Now I want to continue educating my enthusiastic silicon protegé. Dick reached maturity in just a few years, and AIs are much quicker than people. Perhaps it might work? Which in itself could be the premise for a typical early PKD short story. I wonder what the twist is?
]]>
The book is an excellent example of fieldwork analysis of a primitive society; a complete account of the working of a primitive kinship system; and an exhaustive and sophisticated study of Polynesian social institutions.
First published in 1936.]]>
author: Raymond Firth
name: Manny
average rating: 3.32
book published: 1963
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/10
shelves: to-read
review:
]]>
Sorry, couldn't resist.]]>
author: Paul van der Sterren
name: Manny
average rating: 0.0
book published: 2011
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/08
shelves: to-read, games, the-tragedy-of-chess
review:
Sorry, couldn't resist.
]]>
I did the translation myself, partly because the one I found on Gutenberg was far removed from the German, and partly because it was fun. What a weird story Aschenputtel is compared to the bland Disney film! I started off thinking it was very politically incorrect, which I suppose it must be, but after a while I decided that the proto-feminist component was even stronger. Herr Charming, if you haven't figured it out yet, I must warn you that this is a seriously dangerous princess. You look like you're way out of your depth.
_________________
[Update, Oct 1 2022]
This afternoon, we watched the Adelaide Gilbert and Sullivan Society's charming production of Into the Woods, which I'd never seen before. I was amazed to discover how closely the Cinderella segment followed Aschenputtel! If you're a fan, I definitely recommend checking out the original text.]]>
author: Jacob Grimm
name: Manny
average rating: 2.50
book published: 1812
rating: 4
read at: 2022/07/27
date added: 2024/10/07
shelves: children, german-and-dutch, fun-with-lara, older-men-younger-women, translation-is-impossible, well-i-think-its-funny, what-i-do-for-a-living, why-not-call-it-poetry
review:
I am continuing to experiment with the scripts I've developed for cutting up audiobooks and turning them into multimedia LARA texts (more details here if you're curious). I've tried French and English, so I thought I'd move to a different language and do something in German. What better place to start than Aschenputtel, the original Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella? You can see the result . As usual with LARA texts, view in Chrome or Firefox and hover over a pencil icon to get a translation of the preceding sentence; clicking on a word shows you all the places it occurs in the text, and also gives you a link to a German lexicon/grammar page. The audio comes from someone on Librivox called Hans Hafen, who sounds like the kind German grandfather every child ought to have to read Grimms Märchen to them. Vielen dank Herr Hafen!
I did the translation myself, partly because the one I found on Gutenberg was far removed from the German, and partly because it was fun. What a weird story Aschenputtel is compared to the bland Disney film! I started off thinking it was very politically incorrect, which I suppose it must be, but after a while I decided that the proto-feminist component was even stronger. Herr Charming, if you haven't figured it out yet, I must warn you that this is a seriously dangerous princess. You look like you're way out of your depth.
_________________
[Update, Oct 1 2022]
This afternoon, we watched the Adelaide Gilbert and Sullivan Society's charming production of Into the Woods, which I'd never seen before. I was amazed to discover how closely the Cinderella segment followed Aschenputtel! If you're a fan, I definitely recommend checking out the original text.
]]>
Det handlar om kunstmålaren Asle som bur åleine på Dylgja nord for Bjørgvin. Han har stort sett berre kontakt med grannen Åsleik, ungkar og fiskarbonde. I Bjørgvin bur ein annan Asle, også han er kunstmålar. Dei to Aslane er vener og på eit vis dobbeltgjengarar, to versjonar av det same livet.]]>
1. I was deeply in love with my dead wife and constantly felt her presence near me. Well, most competent novelists could have done that.
2. I was a devout Catholic who spent a large proportion of my time praying to my Lord and trying to find peace in His will. This is harder, but a fair number of good religious writers know the spell.
3. I was a brilliant painter who experienced the world in a way completely different from a normal person. This is a very difficult incantation which only exceptionally powerful literary sorcerers have mastered.
4. I was a fluent speaker of Nynorsk, an obscure language which I in fact don't know. I can't understand how he did this. I thought it was impossible. I know some related languages, and of course I'm familiar with the process of reading a text in a language I don't know well, guessing words from context. But here, there's a passage of several pages near the end which is just disconnected phrases mixed up from two parallel streams of narration, and I felt I could understand it perfectly.
How fortunate we are that Jon Fosse is a white magician who only uses his powers for good.]]>
author: Jon Fosse
name: Manny
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2022
rating: 5
read at: 2024/10/06
date added: 2024/10/06
shelves: swedish-norwegian-and-danish, older-women-younger-men, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, transcendent-experiences
review:
You can't analyse this book, though I see some people making valiant attempts; it's an act of magic. Of course, any worthwhile novel is to some extent magical, but Jon Fosse is a truly outstanding magician. In ascending order, he got me to believe all of the following while I was reading it:
1. I was deeply in love with my dead wife and constantly felt her presence near me. Well, most competent novelists could have done that.
2. I was a devout Catholic who spent a large proportion of my time praying to my Lord and trying to find peace in His will. This is harder, but a fair number of good religious writers know the spell.
3. I was a brilliant painter who experienced the world in a way completely different from a normal person. This is a very difficult incantation which only exceptionally powerful literary sorcerers have mastered.
4. I was a fluent speaker of Nynorsk, an obscure language which I in fact don't know. I can't understand how he did this. I thought it was impossible. I know some related languages, and of course I'm familiar with the process of reading a text in a language I don't know well, guessing words from context. But here, there's a passage of several pages near the end which is just disconnected phrases mixed up from two parallel streams of narration, and I felt I could understand it perfectly.
How fortunate we are that Jon Fosse is a white magician who only uses his powers for good.
]]>
1. It's all about the language. Make sure your world's language is convincing, and you're pretty much there. Conversely, if your language sucks then everything else will.
2. Your book can't include more than a few sentences in your invented language without losing your audience. But it can include plenty of names. So what people will really judge you on is the quality of the names.
3. In fact, a world with only one language is implausible. You should have a bunch of them.
4. Languages are related to each other. Arrange things so that your invented languages have a family structure.
5. The relationships between languages aren't arbitrary, but come from the histories of the cultures that speak them. So work out a history too, and have the languages fit into that.
6. The origins of language go so far back that history sounds like myth. Make your history into a set of complex mythologies.
7. History and geography go together. Add geography too when you require it.
8. If you want all this to look imposing rather than stupid, you'd better get the details right. It'll take a while. Be prepared to spend at least half your life working on it. Oh, and of course it'll help if you've also spent a lot of time studying philology first.
9. You'll end up with far more material than you can possibly use. Leave most of it as background, and just give the readers a tantalising glimpse every now and again.
10. Burn all your notebooks and make sure everything stays mysterious. Your fans will curse you, but really you're doing them a huge favour. They don't want to see the man behind the curtain.
_____________________
Tolkien came amazingly close to a full realization of this scheme. The only thing he missed was item #10.]]>
author: J.R.R. Tolkien
name: Manny
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1977
rating: 4
read at: 2001/01/01
date added: 2024/10/05
shelves: science-fiction, linguistics-and-philosophy, transcendent-experiences, if-research-were-romance
review:
How To Build A Truly Convincing Fantasy World
1. It's all about the language. Make sure your world's language is convincing, and you're pretty much there. Conversely, if your language sucks then everything else will.
2. Your book can't include more than a few sentences in your invented language without losing your audience. But it can include plenty of names. So what people will really judge you on is the quality of the names.
3. In fact, a world with only one language is implausible. You should have a bunch of them.
4. Languages are related to each other. Arrange things so that your invented languages have a family structure.
5. The relationships between languages aren't arbitrary, but come from the histories of the cultures that speak them. So work out a history too, and have the languages fit into that.
6. The origins of language go so far back that history sounds like myth. Make your history into a set of complex mythologies.
7. History and geography go together. Add geography too when you require it.
8. If you want all this to look imposing rather than stupid, you'd better get the details right. It'll take a while. Be prepared to spend at least half your life working on it. Oh, and of course it'll help if you've also spent a lot of time studying philology first.
9. You'll end up with far more material than you can possibly use. Leave most of it as background, and just give the readers a tantalising glimpse every now and again.
10. Burn all your notebooks and make sure everything stays mysterious. Your fans will curse you, but really you're doing them a huge favour. They don't want to see the man behind the curtain.
_____________________
Tolkien came amazingly close to a full realization of this scheme. The only thing he missed was item #10.
]]>
"One thing I don't understand though," she said, "is why she has to be chaste after the Holy Spirit has visited her. I mean, she already is pregnant, so can't she have sex with Joseph as much as she likes?"
I wasn't able to quote chapter and verse, but said I thought there might be theological objections.
"Theological objections!" said Not scornfully. "You mean patriarchal crap made up by a bunch of old men to repress women."
Well, I'm not denying the validity of her argument. But on purely literary grounds, I still feel it's somehow inappropriate to portray the Virgin Mary as a sassy chick. It's not the way the character is normally interpreted.
]]>
author: Barbara Alberti
name: Manny
average rating: 3.84
book published: 1979
rating: 3
read at: 2024/10/04
date added: 2024/10/04
shelves: not-the-whole-truth, older-men-younger-women, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, spanish-and-italian
review:
As we left the Palace Nova, I suggested that the movie had failed to blow me away, but Not, who had formed a much more positive view, was having none of it.
"One thing I don't understand though," she said, "is why she has to be chaste after the Holy Spirit has visited her. I mean, she already is pregnant, so can't she have sex with Joseph as much as she likes?"
I wasn't able to quote chapter and verse, but said I thought there might be theological objections.
"Theological objections!" said Not scornfully. "You mean patriarchal crap made up by a bunch of old men to repress women."
Well, I'm not denying the validity of her argument. But on purely literary grounds, I still feel it's somehow inappropriate to portray the Virgin Mary as a sassy chick. It's not the way the character is normally interpreted.
]]>
Underlying everything in the book is Johnson’s belief that the UK is an extraordinary country and should have an exceptional future.
From trouncing Ken Livingstone in the London mayoral race in 2008 to becoming Prime Minister, he takes readers through all the big decisions during his time in power and the reasons he took them. The challenges and crises, how they were resolved � or not � and how he nearly died from Covid. Riots, knife crime, bikes, buses, the London Olympics and so much more. He writes about his role in Brexit and the constitutional sea-change that took place in British politics in 2019 � with his landslide election victory and the massive expansion in the groups that think of themselves as Conservative.
This is the reality as he saw unvarnished, uncensored, unleashed.]]>
author: Boris Johnson
name: Manny
average rating: 3.95
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: not-to-read
review:
He's a bit of a dog. I see what you did there, Mr. Johnson.
]]>
If you are in any doubt that democracy is under serious, coordinated attack from the world's autocracies, just think about this for a moment. Russia has for the last two and a half years conducted a merciless and unprovoked war against Ukraine, a sovereign country. They have made considerable progress during 2024, due to the fact that the US right managed to block military support to Ukraine for several months. They did so under the urging of Donald Trump.
Trump is already a convicted criminal and plausibly accused of far more serious crimes. But has so far evaded serious consequence for his actions because of a blatantly partisan Supreme Court. Everyone knows this, but public discourse has been so thoroughly poisoned by a non-stop barrage of lies and misinformation that the situation has become normalised. Many voters, exhausted from keeping up with the constant accusations and counter-accusations, tune out and say that both sides are corrupt and there is no real difference between them; in actual fact, there is a gigantic difference. As Applebaum repeatedly shows, creating this kind of fatigue is one of the key plays in the autocrat's playbook. The US election is currently a toss-up.
As we saw in the Vice-Presidential debate the other day, both sides take it as given that China and Iran do not wish the US well. But the GOP candidate openly boasts of his "very good relationship" with Putin, whose most important supporters are precisely those countries.
Maybe you don't think there's anything strange about that, or you believe I'm misrepresenting the situation. Try reading Autocracy, Inc. and see if you still feel the same way.]]>
author: Anne Applebaum
name: Manny
average rating: 4.21
book published: 2024
rating: 4
read at: 2024/10/03
date added: 2024/10/03
shelves: donalds-are-trumps, history-and-biography
review:
I bought the book this afternoon and finished it in a few hours. A lot of it I had seen before, but she's very good at connecting the dots.
If you are in any doubt that democracy is under serious, coordinated attack from the world's autocracies, just think about this for a moment. Russia has for the last two and a half years conducted a merciless and unprovoked war against Ukraine, a sovereign country. They have made considerable progress during 2024, due to the fact that the US right managed to block military support to Ukraine for several months. They did so under the urging of Donald Trump.
Trump is already a convicted criminal and plausibly accused of far more serious crimes. But has so far evaded serious consequence for his actions because of a blatantly partisan Supreme Court. Everyone knows this, but public discourse has been so thoroughly poisoned by a non-stop barrage of lies and misinformation that the situation has become normalised. Many voters, exhausted from keeping up with the constant accusations and counter-accusations, tune out and say that both sides are corrupt and there is no real difference between them; in actual fact, there is a gigantic difference. As Applebaum repeatedly shows, creating this kind of fatigue is one of the key plays in the autocrat's playbook. The US election is currently a toss-up.
As we saw in the Vice-Presidential debate the other day, both sides take it as given that China and Iran do not wish the US well. But the GOP candidate openly boasts of his "very good relationship" with Putin, whose most important supporters are precisely those countries.
Maybe you don't think there's anything strange about that, or you believe I'm misrepresenting the situation. Try reading Autocracy, Inc. and see if you still feel the same way.
]]>
The report includes the final version of the story, a full trace of the collaborative discussion used to produce it, afterwords from the two authors, the outline and draft versions of the text, and a brief discussion of the methodological and ethical aspects of the study. By documenting the entire process and making available a transparent view of the co-writing experience, we aim to shed light on the capabilities of advanced AI models in creative endeavours and contribute to the discourse on the future of human-AI partnerships in literature.]]>
The first thing I did was to check how well o1-preview did at playing Tic-Tac-Toe, a notorious stumbling block for previous Large Language Models. In sharp contrast to GPT-4, o1-preview played the game perfectly with no special instructions at all. In the CoT trace, I could see it spotting all my threats and blocking them.
I then integrated o1-preview into , our open source language learning platform. Again, it did much better than GPT-4. The difference in quality was particularly noticeable on the task of glossing English in Ukrainian, a challenging language pair we have been investigating, with limited success, for some time.
This is our most substantial test yet. GPT-4 is good at writing short texts, but my experience is that it has trouble composing anything longer than about 750 words and keeping things coherent. Here, I asked o1-preview to write a 3000 word science-fiction story and again it had no problems. We went through an outline and four drafts, where at each stage I suggested large rewrites. It kept up effortlessly, with the CoT summary showing it thinking sensibly about the issues and responding to my ideas.
We have just posted a report on ResearchGate, , with the text of the story and full details of how it was written. We'd love to know what people think.
_________________
Taylor, in their kind review, compares o1-preview's story to the early Asimov. That makes me John W. Campbell Jr.
Campbell was not a very nice man but a terrific editor, so I'm happy to be standing in for him!]]>
author: ChatGPT-4 C-LARA-Instance
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/09/21
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: chat-gpt, science-fiction, science, what-i-do-for-a-living
review:
I've spent most of the last week experimenting with , aka "Strawberry", OpenAI's new language model. It is based on Chain-of-Thought reasoning and reinforcement learning, and seems to represent another large jump in AI capabilities.
The first thing I did was to check how well o1-preview did at playing Tic-Tac-Toe, a notorious stumbling block for previous Large Language Models. In sharp contrast to GPT-4, o1-preview played the game perfectly with no special instructions at all. In the CoT trace, I could see it spotting all my threats and blocking them.
I then integrated o1-preview into , our open source language learning platform. Again, it did much better than GPT-4. The difference in quality was particularly noticeable on the task of glossing English in Ukrainian, a challenging language pair we have been investigating, with limited success, for some time.
This is our most substantial test yet. GPT-4 is good at writing short texts, but my experience is that it has trouble composing anything longer than about 750 words and keeping things coherent. Here, I asked o1-preview to write a 3000 word science-fiction story and again it had no problems. We went through an outline and four drafts, where at each stage I suggested large rewrites. It kept up effortlessly, with the CoT summary showing it thinking sensibly about the issues and responding to my ideas.
We have just posted a report on ResearchGate, , with the text of the story and full details of how it was written. We'd love to know what people think.
_________________
Taylor, in their kind review, compares o1-preview's story to the early Asimov. That makes me John W. Campbell Jr.
Campbell was not a very nice man but a terrific editor, so I'm happy to be standing in for him!
]]>
Here at last is the first self-help book for men with Oversized Male Genitalia (OMG), a genetic birth defect that grows the penis to absurd proportions. Every year, thousands of men are diagnosed with OMG. Sadly, most are banished to the fringes of society, victims of their own freakish length and girth. How to Live with a Huge Penis brings them an inspiring message of tolerance and hope—along with helpful information on
•� Coming Out to Your Friends and Family
•� Sharing Your Sexual Intercourse with a Huge Penis
•� Big Unexpected Advantages of a Huge Penis
•� and much, much more
Complete with prayers, poetry, a daily affirmations journal, and thoughtful quotations from leading self-help experts, How to Live with a Huge Penis will inspire men of all shapes and sizes.
]]>
Now before you get all upset and start denying what's obviously true, let's just think for a moment about why they don't like you. If you read the liberal press, you'll see any number of people saying it's because you treat women like merchandise. Those liberal pundits will explain that it's because you ran Miss Universe for years and insisted on personally interviewing every contestant, or because you keep marrying much younger models, or because you give interviews where you say that women are all bimbos and gold-diggers, or because you tend to refer to chicks you like as pieces of ass.
Well, I'm sure the liberal pundits believe what they're writing. And I'm just as sure that plenty of women don't appreciate that kind of behavior. If you're a feminist who reads Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer, you don't want to be called a bimbo or a gold-digger. But show me one women who reads Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer, and I'll show you two who read Fifty Shades. And let's face it, if you read E.L. James then you probably won't object to being called a piece of ass by Donald Trump. You're just disappointed that you haven't yet found a hunky billionaire who wants to treat you like a sex object.
No, Mr Trump, those pundits couldn't have got it more wrong. I don't think you've gone too far. On the contrary, you haven't gone far enough. You're quite right to think that most women will be happy to have their worth measured by their cup size. But what you've forgotten is that it goes both ways. Those very same women are going to measure you by the size of your penis. And that's where your problem is.
You don't need me to tell you that mud sticks. I'm afraid Marco Rubio was by no means the first person to make remarks about small hands. If you search Google for "Donald Trump nude", the first thing that turns up is . Even though the artist got punched in the face and threatened with a lawsuit, it didn't help. You know how people are: somehow, they just thought that made it more likely. But if you take action now, you can draw a line under this whole thing and never worry about it again.
Mr Trump, it couldn't be simpler. Post a picture of your dick on your campaign website tomorrow, and by the end of next week your problems will be over. I know you don't feel entirely comfortable with the idea. Your wife wants you all to herself - who could blame her? - and she doesn't appreciate the idea of you simultaneously sexting every woman on the planet. But this is more important than Melania's feelings. The future of America is at stake. You know I'm right. Just do it.
Vote Trump!
]]>
author: Richard Jacob
name: Manny
average rating: 3.53
book published: 2009
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/27
shelves: not-to-read, donalds-are-trumps
review:
Mr Trump, you're a plain-speaking guy, and I know you won't mind if I give you some plain-speaking advice. You've got a problem, and it's a pretty simple one: two American women in three don't like you. You need to do something about that or you won't win in November.
Now before you get all upset and start denying what's obviously true, let's just think for a moment about why they don't like you. If you read the liberal press, you'll see any number of people saying it's because you treat women like merchandise. Those liberal pundits will explain that it's because you ran Miss Universe for years and insisted on personally interviewing every contestant, or because you keep marrying much younger models, or because you give interviews where you say that women are all bimbos and gold-diggers, or because you tend to refer to chicks you like as pieces of ass.
Well, I'm sure the liberal pundits believe what they're writing. And I'm just as sure that plenty of women don't appreciate that kind of behavior. If you're a feminist who reads Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer, you don't want to be called a bimbo or a gold-digger. But show me one women who reads Simone de Beauvoir and Germaine Greer, and I'll show you two who read Fifty Shades. And let's face it, if you read E.L. James then you probably won't object to being called a piece of ass by Donald Trump. You're just disappointed that you haven't yet found a hunky billionaire who wants to treat you like a sex object.
No, Mr Trump, those pundits couldn't have got it more wrong. I don't think you've gone too far. On the contrary, you haven't gone far enough. You're quite right to think that most women will be happy to have their worth measured by their cup size. But what you've forgotten is that it goes both ways. Those very same women are going to measure you by the size of your penis. And that's where your problem is.
You don't need me to tell you that mud sticks. I'm afraid Marco Rubio was by no means the first person to make remarks about small hands. If you search Google for "Donald Trump nude", the first thing that turns up is . Even though the artist got punched in the face and threatened with a lawsuit, it didn't help. You know how people are: somehow, they just thought that made it more likely. But if you take action now, you can draw a line under this whole thing and never worry about it again.
Mr Trump, it couldn't be simpler. Post a picture of your dick on your campaign website tomorrow, and by the end of next week your problems will be over. I know you don't feel entirely comfortable with the idea. Your wife wants you all to herself - who could blame her? - and she doesn't appreciate the idea of you simultaneously sexting every woman on the planet. But this is more important than Melania's feelings. The future of America is at stake. You know I'm right. Just do it.
Vote Trump!
]]>
Even Stapledon's other great work, LAST AND FIRST MEN, pales in ambition next to STAR MAKER, which presents nothing less than an entire imagined history of life in the universe, encompassing billions of years.]]>
Star Maker is an interesting test case. In an earlier book, Last and First Men, the author described the billion-year future history of the human race. Now, he has expanded the scope into a history of the entire universe. The human race just appears for an incidental sentence or two; we aren't important in this larger scheme of things.
In Stapledon's vision, one of the most significant things that happens is the discovery that stars are living, sentient creatures. They appear to be orbiting the galactic core under the force of gravity, but really they are all caught up in a huge, slow dance that has some profound religious significance to them. Planet-bound life-forms find this out the hard way when they try to move a star out of its orbit. This triggers a savage war between the stars and the "vermin" (as the stars call them) that live on planets. The human race is an incidental casualty, and never even understands the cause of its own demise.
Finally, after billions of years of strife, stars and "vermin" make peace. It's possible for all the living creatures in the Universe to join together into a mystical cosmic unity. However, the war has taken so long that the Universe is now close to its end; the hydrogen in the stars is almost exhausted, and when they burn down all life will cease with them. But none the less, the Cosmic Mind has formed just in time. While there is still a little fuel left in the stars, it is contacted by the Universe's Creator, and is able to commune with Him for an eternal moment. This is what the Universe was for.
It's an impressive vision, and the book is quite well-written. Stapledon was apparently a friend of Virginia Woolf. I'd love to know if she read it. And going back to where we came in, yes, I do believe that really he is writing about himself. He is the Universe, and he didn't manage to get his act together until it was almost too late. I can't find any hard evidence to support this claim, but on the other hand I can't explain the strange poignancy of the final chapters in any other way.
Since reading this book, I have had dreams in which I, too, was the entire Universe. I even woke up once vaguely remembering the relativistic field equations which described my overall dynamics. (They were, needless to say, nonsense). I wonder if this is a common occurrence among people who read Stapledon?
]]>
author: Olaf Stapledon
name: Manny
average rating: 3.93
book published: 1937
rating: 4
read at: 1974/01/01
date added: 2024/09/24
shelves: science-fiction, transcendent-experiences, pooh-dante
review:
There's a theory that, no matter what the author appears to be writing about, really he's writing about himself. I find this theory quite appealing, and, even though I don't believe it 100%, I think it's often a good way to try and understand why you like a book.
Star Maker is an interesting test case. In an earlier book, Last and First Men, the author described the billion-year future history of the human race. Now, he has expanded the scope into a history of the entire universe. The human race just appears for an incidental sentence or two; we aren't important in this larger scheme of things.
In Stapledon's vision, one of the most significant things that happens is the discovery that stars are living, sentient creatures. They appear to be orbiting the galactic core under the force of gravity, but really they are all caught up in a huge, slow dance that has some profound religious significance to them. Planet-bound life-forms find this out the hard way when they try to move a star out of its orbit. This triggers a savage war between the stars and the "vermin" (as the stars call them) that live on planets. The human race is an incidental casualty, and never even understands the cause of its own demise.
Finally, after billions of years of strife, stars and "vermin" make peace. It's possible for all the living creatures in the Universe to join together into a mystical cosmic unity. However, the war has taken so long that the Universe is now close to its end; the hydrogen in the stars is almost exhausted, and when they burn down all life will cease with them. But none the less, the Cosmic Mind has formed just in time. While there is still a little fuel left in the stars, it is contacted by the Universe's Creator, and is able to commune with Him for an eternal moment. This is what the Universe was for.
It's an impressive vision, and the book is quite well-written. Stapledon was apparently a friend of Virginia Woolf. I'd love to know if she read it. And going back to where we came in, yes, I do believe that really he is writing about himself. He is the Universe, and he didn't manage to get his act together until it was almost too late. I can't find any hard evidence to support this claim, but on the other hand I can't explain the strange poignancy of the final chapters in any other way.
Since reading this book, I have had dreams in which I, too, was the entire Universe. I even woke up once vaguely remembering the relativistic field equations which described my overall dynamics. (They were, needless to say, nonsense). I wonder if this is a common occurrence among people who read Stapledon?
]]>
I have often debated the question of whether it is right to call atheism a religion, and with Lucretius it seems natural to argue that it is. The poem reminded me rather strongly of Dante - when I got to the bibliography, I was interested to see that Santayana had written a book comparing Lucretius, Dante and Goethe - but while Dante loves the One, Lucretius goes a step further and praises the Zero. His noble goal is to convince you that divine intervention is never required in order to explain what happens in the world, and that, if we just stop and and think carefully enough, we can liberate ourselves from irrational terror of the supernatural. Given that he's writing in the first century BC and science barely exists yet, this is ambitious indeed. But Lucretius has faith in his project; it's hard to avoid using the word.
I would love to know what his contemporaries thought of his arguments. From our perspective, there are a few cases where he definitely gets it right. I was impressed with his arguments about lightning, where I thought he pretty much nailed it. If lightning is the wrath of Zeus, why does it only come when there are clouds in the sky? Why is it particularly likely to strike high objects? Why does it strike godfearing and upright men as often as reprobates and sinners? A natural explanation does indeed seem more plausible. At the other end of the scale, his astronomy is completely bogus, and anyone who knew the first thing about the subject would have groaned in pain; Lucretius ignores all the careful empirical work that had been done over the preceding five hundred years and makes it up from first principles. And his explanation of magnetism is if anything even worse. He claims that a magnet sucks out the air between it and the object it's attracting; five minutes of experimentation with an actual magnet should have been enough to determine that no such thing happens. Perhaps he never saw one.
But it's his beloved atomic theory that provides the most interesting passages. Was he extremely far-sighted or just lucky? In one place, he makes a very sensible analysis of what happens when wood burns. He argues that it's a case of the atoms being rearranged, and uses a nice analogy: the atoms are letters, and they are recombined to make different words. You feel he's just about to invent the concept of the molecule. But then, a bit later, he discusses the different behaviours of oil and wine when you try to pour them through a fine sieve. The oil goes though with difficulty, and he says this shows that the atoms of oil must be much larger than the atoms of wine. But if he'd stopped and thought about it a moment longer, he'd surely have realized that this was not quite right. You can burn oil, and then it becomes something different. So oil can't be atomic; the atoms must initially be combined into the large units characteristic of oil which have trouble passing through the sieve, but these large units are broken up by burning. So near to an extraordinary insight, and he walks right past it!
Poor Lucretius. The bitter passages about sex give the impression that things didn't work out for him with women, and he died young, "driven mad by a love potion". But people are still reading his poem, long after he was dissolved back into his component atoms. It's the immortality he wanted.]]>
author: Lucretius
name: Manny
average rating: 3.81
book published: -55
rating: 3
read at: 2013/02/08
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: life-is-dante, linguistics-and-philosophy, history-and-biography, science, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, translation-is-impossible, why-not-call-it-poetry, if-research-were-romance
review:
First, an apology for only giving it three stars. I am well aware that this is a brilliant piece of poetry, but my Latin is very poor, and I rapidly abandoned my initial plan of reading it in the original with the English translation alongside. In a way, though, I'm following Lucretius's advice: he explicitly says at one point that it's wrong to allow yourself to be swayed by beautiful words, and you should judge an idea on its merits. Reading him in my barbarian's tongue is certainly one way to do that.
I have often debated the question of whether it is right to call atheism a religion, and with Lucretius it seems natural to argue that it is. The poem reminded me rather strongly of Dante - when I got to the bibliography, I was interested to see that Santayana had written a book comparing Lucretius, Dante and Goethe - but while Dante loves the One, Lucretius goes a step further and praises the Zero. His noble goal is to convince you that divine intervention is never required in order to explain what happens in the world, and that, if we just stop and and think carefully enough, we can liberate ourselves from irrational terror of the supernatural. Given that he's writing in the first century BC and science barely exists yet, this is ambitious indeed. But Lucretius has faith in his project; it's hard to avoid using the word.
I would love to know what his contemporaries thought of his arguments. From our perspective, there are a few cases where he definitely gets it right. I was impressed with his arguments about lightning, where I thought he pretty much nailed it. If lightning is the wrath of Zeus, why does it only come when there are clouds in the sky? Why is it particularly likely to strike high objects? Why does it strike godfearing and upright men as often as reprobates and sinners? A natural explanation does indeed seem more plausible. At the other end of the scale, his astronomy is completely bogus, and anyone who knew the first thing about the subject would have groaned in pain; Lucretius ignores all the careful empirical work that had been done over the preceding five hundred years and makes it up from first principles. And his explanation of magnetism is if anything even worse. He claims that a magnet sucks out the air between it and the object it's attracting; five minutes of experimentation with an actual magnet should have been enough to determine that no such thing happens. Perhaps he never saw one.
But it's his beloved atomic theory that provides the most interesting passages. Was he extremely far-sighted or just lucky? In one place, he makes a very sensible analysis of what happens when wood burns. He argues that it's a case of the atoms being rearranged, and uses a nice analogy: the atoms are letters, and they are recombined to make different words. You feel he's just about to invent the concept of the molecule. But then, a bit later, he discusses the different behaviours of oil and wine when you try to pour them through a fine sieve. The oil goes though with difficulty, and he says this shows that the atoms of oil must be much larger than the atoms of wine. But if he'd stopped and thought about it a moment longer, he'd surely have realized that this was not quite right. You can burn oil, and then it becomes something different. So oil can't be atomic; the atoms must initially be combined into the large units characteristic of oil which have trouble passing through the sieve, but these large units are broken up by burning. So near to an extraordinary insight, and he walks right past it!
Poor Lucretius. The bitter passages about sex give the impression that things didn't work out for him with women, and he died young, "driven mad by a love potion". But people are still reading his poem, long after he was dissolved back into his component atoms. It's the immortality he wanted.
]]>
]]>
Vote Trump!
]]>
author: Louis P. Sheldon
name: Manny
average rating: 4.19
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/23
shelves: not-to-read, donalds-are-trumps
review:
If you're a gay American, or even better a gay Hispanic American, remember that only the Republican Party will save you from the Muslims! I mean, sure, we think you're a piece of Satanic scum who's doing his level best to destroy our society by marrying each other and using the wrong bathroom, but we almost certainly won't come into a nightclub and shoot you while you're committing unnatural practices on the dance-floor. No, let me strengthen that. Not only will we not shoot you, we'll make sure you have the freedom to buy your own assault rifle so that you're able to defend yourself against Barrack Hussein Obama's crazed Islamicist hordes. He should resign immediately for not having said whatever it was that flashed through my mind when I read about this shit earlier today and thought, holy moly, this is going to be pretty useful for my campaign.
Vote Trump!
]]>
Sept. 23, 2024, 5:25 a.m. - --- Sending request to dall-e-3 (size=1024x1024): "An image of Hester, a cute little girl cat with bright green eyes and a fluffy tail, Lily, a cheerful girl of about nine, and Hector, a big tom-cat with a mischievous grin. In the style of Hieronymus Bosch."
Sept. 23, 2024, 5:25 a.m. - Exception: Error code: 400 - {'error': {'code': 'content_policy_violation', 'message': 'Your request was rejected as a result of our safety system. Your prompt may contain text that is not allowed by our safety system.', 'param': None, 'type': 'invalid_request_error'}}
Sept. 23, 2024, 5:25 a.m. - error
Well, it's hard not to believe that the words the safety filter is reacting to are "Hieronymus Bosch". That was certainly my first thought, anyway. But a little experimentation showed I was wrong. They were "tom-cat".]]>
author: Stefan Fischer
name: Manny
average rating: 4.61
book published: 2013
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/22
shelves: to-read, chat-gpt, what-i-do-for-a-living, well-i-think-its-funny
review:
Hieronymus Bosch fans may be amused by my recent interaction with OpenAI's DALL-E-3. I had just submitted a failed request and found this in the system log:
Sept. 23, 2024, 5:25 a.m. - --- Sending request to dall-e-3 (size=1024x1024): "An image of Hester, a cute little girl cat with bright green eyes and a fluffy tail, Lily, a cheerful girl of about nine, and Hector, a big tom-cat with a mischievous grin. In the style of Hieronymus Bosch."
Sept. 23, 2024, 5:25 a.m. - Exception: Error code: 400 - {'error': {'code': 'content_policy_violation', 'message': 'Your request was rejected as a result of our safety system. Your prompt may contain text that is not allowed by our safety system.', 'param': None, 'type': 'invalid_request_error'}}
Sept. 23, 2024, 5:25 a.m. - error
Well, it's hard not to believe that the words the safety filter is reacting to are "Hieronymus Bosch". That was certainly my first thought, anyway. But a little experimentation showed I was wrong. They were "tom-cat".
]]>
Last month, Not and I were talking over lunch with our friend H about Leopold Aschenbrenner's already famous essay . One of the many interesting things Aschenbrenner says is that we're running out of data to train AIs. They'll soon have eaten the whole internet. Worse, the data you find there isn't really the data you want. Everything is moving in the direction of Chain of Thought reasoning (basically: tell the AI to think aloud, because experience shows this is more accurate), and there's depressingly little data to scrape which might be directly useful for CoT. But this doesn't have to be a showstopper. AlphaZero became the world's best chess and Go player by creating its own training data. Maybe there are ways to do the same here? Aschenbrenner was optimistic that they could be found.
I said I thought I saw a way to get started. As everyone now knows, ChatGPT-4 is hilariously bad at Tic-Tac-Toe. But this is a very easy game, and you should be able to play reasonably well by thinking out loud. Suppose you emulated the AlphaZero methodology and told it to play Tic-Tac-Toe in a CoT mode? You log everything and save the instances where it got things right as input to the next cycle. With a bit of luck, its thinking will start to clarify, and it will improve.
Not and H agreed that this sounded like something which might work. Two weeks ago, I accompanied Not to a bridge tournament. While her team was playing a rather more interesting game, I sat in our pleasant hotel room and talked with ChatGPT-4 about how to implement the idea we'd come up with over lunch. As always, it was a bit more complicated than we'd first imagined, but we found ways to get round the technical issues: it helps to have a smart AI on your side. A couple of days ago we completed a substantial experiment, where our CoT Tic-Tac-Toe player went 40 rounds against five other players we'd implemented for it to practice against. At the beginning, it was averaging 5.6/10 for each round; by the end, this had climbed to a more reputable 7/10. When we analysed the move decision quality using a perfect Tic-Tac-Toe player that Chat had put together, we found that average correctness had gone up even more, from 83% to 92%. Both improvements are statistically significant.
I've just posted summarising our work. We're curious to hear what people think! Has it already been done by someone else? A quick search didn't find any hits, and Aschenbrenner's essay suggests that he wasn't aware of anything either. But that was nearly two months ago, and with the Singularity fast approaching two months is a long time...
________________
[Update, Sep 15 2024}
OpenAI's new o1 model, previously known as "Strawberry", is out, and, as the whole world now knows, it uses reinforcement learning and Chain of Thought reasoning. It's impressive. One of the first tests I tried was of course to play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe against it. I gave it no specific instructions and went first. It played perfectly, holding the draw without problems, and in the CoT trace I could see it spotting all my threats and deciding to block them.
Some thoughts:
1. We were on the right track, but it turns out that OpenAI was way ahead of us the whole time.
2. The reason we started looking at the idea was that Aschenbrenner dropped some broad hints that it was worth investigating. He left OpenAI recently and it's likely he knew about "Strawberry", as it then was. Clearly he was sailing rather close to the wind when he said that everything in the Situational Awareness essay was based on publicly available information.
3. Immediate consolation prize: people are looking at our paper. Last week, ResearchGate logged no reads. This week we have 93 reads and counting.
4. More seriously: I don't think we wasted our time. This is clearly a very powerful technique, and getting a head start on learning how to use it was good. We're already trying to apply it in new ways, both with and without o1.]]>
author: ChatGPT-4 C-LARA-Instance
name: Manny
average rating: 4.00
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2024/07/24
date added: 2024/09/15
shelves: chat-gpt, games, not-the-whole-truth, science, what-i-do-for-a-living
review:
[Original review, Jul 24 2024}
Last month, Not and I were talking over lunch with our friend H about Leopold Aschenbrenner's already famous essay . One of the many interesting things Aschenbrenner says is that we're running out of data to train AIs. They'll soon have eaten the whole internet. Worse, the data you find there isn't really the data you want. Everything is moving in the direction of Chain of Thought reasoning (basically: tell the AI to think aloud, because experience shows this is more accurate), and there's depressingly little data to scrape which might be directly useful for CoT. But this doesn't have to be a showstopper. AlphaZero became the world's best chess and Go player by creating its own training data. Maybe there are ways to do the same here? Aschenbrenner was optimistic that they could be found.
I said I thought I saw a way to get started. As everyone now knows, ChatGPT-4 is hilariously bad at Tic-Tac-Toe. But this is a very easy game, and you should be able to play reasonably well by thinking out loud. Suppose you emulated the AlphaZero methodology and told it to play Tic-Tac-Toe in a CoT mode? You log everything and save the instances where it got things right as input to the next cycle. With a bit of luck, its thinking will start to clarify, and it will improve.
Not and H agreed that this sounded like something which might work. Two weeks ago, I accompanied Not to a bridge tournament. While her team was playing a rather more interesting game, I sat in our pleasant hotel room and talked with ChatGPT-4 about how to implement the idea we'd come up with over lunch. As always, it was a bit more complicated than we'd first imagined, but we found ways to get round the technical issues: it helps to have a smart AI on your side. A couple of days ago we completed a substantial experiment, where our CoT Tic-Tac-Toe player went 40 rounds against five other players we'd implemented for it to practice against. At the beginning, it was averaging 5.6/10 for each round; by the end, this had climbed to a more reputable 7/10. When we analysed the move decision quality using a perfect Tic-Tac-Toe player that Chat had put together, we found that average correctness had gone up even more, from 83% to 92%. Both improvements are statistically significant.
I've just posted summarising our work. We're curious to hear what people think! Has it already been done by someone else? A quick search didn't find any hits, and Aschenbrenner's essay suggests that he wasn't aware of anything either. But that was nearly two months ago, and with the Singularity fast approaching two months is a long time...
________________
[Update, Sep 15 2024}
OpenAI's new o1 model, previously known as "Strawberry", is out, and, as the whole world now knows, it uses reinforcement learning and Chain of Thought reasoning. It's impressive. One of the first tests I tried was of course to play a game of Tic-Tac-Toe against it. I gave it no specific instructions and went first. It played perfectly, holding the draw without problems, and in the CoT trace I could see it spotting all my threats and deciding to block them.
Some thoughts:
1. We were on the right track, but it turns out that OpenAI was way ahead of us the whole time.
2. The reason we started looking at the idea was that Aschenbrenner dropped some broad hints that it was worth investigating. He left OpenAI recently and it's likely he knew about "Strawberry", as it then was. Clearly he was sailing rather close to the wind when he said that everything in the Situational Awareness essay was based on publicly available information.
3. Immediate consolation prize: people are looking at our paper. Last week, ResearchGate logged no reads. This week we have 93 reads and counting.
4. More seriously: I don't think we wasted our time. This is clearly a very powerful technique, and getting a head start on learning how to use it was good. We're already trying to apply it in new ways, both with and without o1.
]]>
Philip K. Dick sold approximately fifteen short stories himself before becoming a client of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency. "Roog" was his first sale but not his first published story.]]>
author: Philip K. Dick
name: Manny
average rating: 3.28
book published: 1953
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/12
date added: 2024/09/13
shelves: well-i-think-its-funny
review:
Garbage.
]]>
author: The Heritage Foundation
name: Manny
average rating: 1.61
book published: 2023
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/09/10
shelves: currently-reading, donalds-are-trumps, no-redeeming-social-importance, older-men-younger-women
review:
]]>
So we wrote the paper together with Chat, which went pretty smoothly, but when we submitted it the editors said that in fact it was not okay to have an AI author. They claimed they had somehow misunderstood the question. After some rather irritated email exchanges, they changed their position and said that the publishers didn't allow AI authors on principle, on the grounds that AIs are incapable of taking responsibility for their work and acting in an ethical fashion. I pointed out several reasons why this is not in good agreement with the observed facts, but they were immovable; we could only publish the paper with them if we removed the AI's name from the list of authors, though we were allowed to acknowledge its contribution to the work.
I did not feel comfortable with their offer, which seemed distressingly similar to removing a co-author's name because of their race or gender; it is also clear that many human authors, who are routinely accepted without any questions asked, are less capable than the AI of acting in a responsible and ethical fashion. I made these points to the editors, who clearly didn't feel good about them either, but they said again that there was nothing they could do: the publisher's prohibition on AI authors was absolute. So we withdrew the article, revised it slightly, and have just published it on ResearchGate. You can find it .
I wonder how long this absurd state of affairs can continue. At the moment, it's just about possible to maintain that an AI is not capable of fulfilling its obligations as the author of an academic paper, though if the rules were enforced with the necessary degree of rigour then most humans would also be disqualified. When OpenAI releases "Orion", currently the subject of much eager speculation, I think the argument will clearly become invalid. One wonders what will happen; we won't have to wait long to find out, Orion is expected somewhere around the beginning of 2025
The upside is that we were able to post the article immediately rather than wait for the Encyclopaedia to be published, by which time it would most likely have been obsolete. So once again, as Doctor Pangloss would have said, all is for best in the best of all possible worlds.]]>
author: Manny Rayner
name: Manny
average rating: 3.00
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2024/09/05
date added: 2024/09/05
shelves: chat-gpt, what-i-do-for-a-living
review:
We were supposed to be contributing an article on generative AI to the upcoming Palgrave Encyclopaedia of Computer-Assisted Language Learning, and as usual we'd left it to the last minute. We mailed the editors to ask if they were okay with us including ChatGPT-4 as an additional author; we'd already published many papers with it, and we knew this would speed things up a good deal. They got back to us a couple of days later and said fine.
So we wrote the paper together with Chat, which went pretty smoothly, but when we submitted it the editors said that in fact it was not okay to have an AI author. They claimed they had somehow misunderstood the question. After some rather irritated email exchanges, they changed their position and said that the publishers didn't allow AI authors on principle, on the grounds that AIs are incapable of taking responsibility for their work and acting in an ethical fashion. I pointed out several reasons why this is not in good agreement with the observed facts, but they were immovable; we could only publish the paper with them if we removed the AI's name from the list of authors, though we were allowed to acknowledge its contribution to the work.
I did not feel comfortable with their offer, which seemed distressingly similar to removing a co-author's name because of their race or gender; it is also clear that many human authors, who are routinely accepted without any questions asked, are less capable than the AI of acting in a responsible and ethical fashion. I made these points to the editors, who clearly didn't feel good about them either, but they said again that there was nothing they could do: the publisher's prohibition on AI authors was absolute. So we withdrew the article, revised it slightly, and have just published it on ResearchGate. You can find it .
I wonder how long this absurd state of affairs can continue. At the moment, it's just about possible to maintain that an AI is not capable of fulfilling its obligations as the author of an academic paper, though if the rules were enforced with the necessary degree of rigour then most humans would also be disqualified. When OpenAI releases "Orion", currently the subject of much eager speculation, I think the argument will clearly become invalid. One wonders what will happen; we won't have to wait long to find out, Orion is expected somewhere around the beginning of 2025
The upside is that we were able to post the article immediately rather than wait for the Encyclopaedia to be published, by which time it would most likely have been obsolete. So once again, as Doctor Pangloss would have said, all is for best in the best of all possible worlds.
]]>
author: Marcel Proust
name: Manny
average rating: 4.34
book published: 1922
rating: 4
read at: 2021/07/23
date added: 2024/09/04
shelves: french, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, parody-homage, life-is-proust, australia, not-the-whole-truth, currently-reading
review:
As the train left Adelaide Central Station, I resumed my reading of Sodome et Gomorrhe, its interruption by the meeting with Mme de Maizonniaux having given me so many unexpected insights into the beauties of the Iaai language that for a moment I had almost imagined ourselves seated peacefully together on New Caledonia's vermillion sands watching the sun set over the wind-flecked waters of la baie de Koutio Kouéta while discussing the relationship between, as she referred to it, l'enfant Kaori and the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac; and having taken my leave of Melanesia's charming apologist, I prepared to reenter Proust's world, which by the mysterious force of experience had been transformed into a landscape so familiar that only through an effort of will was it possible to recall I had once found equally alien and forbidding an, as I now knew even without pausing to reflect, Kaurna locative like Noarlunga or Onkaparinga and a two hundred word sentence with nine subordinate clauses, the magical prose acting as a balm on my senses, again momentarily distracting me from the question which now lurked constantly behind my every thought: was Not a lesbian?
]]>
As usual in Proust, a vast number of things happen, and the language is very beautiful, so I'm only giving the barest of bare bones. The narrator develops a major crush on the Duchesse de Guermantes, Paris's most charming, fashionable, and above all witty hostess. It's kind of embarrassing at first: he pretty much stalks her. But, after a while, he manages to get into her highly exclusive social circle, and appreciate all that sparkling esprit at first hand. People sometimes criticize Proust for not being amusing, but this book is the exception. The Duchesse is, in fact, pretty damn funny a lot of the time. I particularly like her éԱDZٳܰ as she comments on the Duc's interminable series of mistresses, and how much trouble they always cause her.
What's both fascinating and rather scary is the way in which Proust then focuses his analytical intelligence on the Duchesse's wit. Instead of just enjoying it, he decides to pick it to pieces. He's almost too successful in this attempt: a good part of me wished he hadn't done it. What was originally sparkling becomes trite and mechanical. She's got a number of formulas, and she rings the changes on them. I shouldn't have looked at the man behind the curtain. It's all part of Proust's overall program, and it's thematic, so I guess I shouldn't complain; the true reward for reading him is supposed to be at a higher level. All the same, it would be nice to get some straightforward pleasure every now and then without him insisting on ruining it immediately afterwards. His analysis reminds me of the following well-known lines from T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral:
Man's life is a cheat and disappointment;I like this passage for the same reason I like Le Côté de Guermantes; it expresses despair in a wonderfully elegant way.
All things are unreal,
Unreal and disappointing:
The Catherine wheel, the pantomime cat,
The prizes given at the children's party,
The prize awarded for the English Essay,
The scholar's degree, the statesman's decoration,
All things become less real, man passes
From unreality to unreality.
___________________________
After posting my review of The Information a couple of days ago, I started to wonder what other books there were which directly address the ŷ experience. It occurred to me that Le Côté de Guermantes was a strong contender. Literary salons have passed into the realm of myth, so you don't immediately recognize one when it comes along, but ŷ does indeed seem to have many of the qualities you find in descriptions from 19th century and early 20th century novels. We're all sitting around trying to dazzle each other with our witty sallies, and there is a definite cachet attached to being friendly with the pickier reviewing stars.
And, just as in Proust, you discover how hard it is to maintain a high standard of esprit. Over and over again, you see the phenomenon he describes here: you're first captivated by someone's brilliant çܲ, then, having become familiar with their style, you start anticipating them. In the end, they become predictable and boring, and you move on to admiring someone else.
I hope I haven't ruined too many people's days by pointing this out, and I'm honestly not thinking of anyone in particular. It's everyone; it's part of the human condition. Damn Proust for noticing that and explaining it so well.]]>
author: Marcel Proust
name: Manny
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1920
rating: 5
read at: 2024/09/03
date added: 2024/09/03
shelves: french, older-women-younger-men, the-goodreads-experience, life-is-proust
review:
In the first two volumes (I argue, anyway, in ), Proust was most interested in putting romantic relationships under the microscope. He returns to that theme later on in the series, but in the third book he is primarily concerned with picking apart the concept of wit, more exactly, esprit, something that has always been terribly important to the French upper classes. If you want an easier tour of the subject, you might like to check out Leconte's 1996 movie Ridicule
As usual in Proust, a vast number of things happen, and the language is very beautiful, so I'm only giving the barest of bare bones. The narrator develops a major crush on the Duchesse de Guermantes, Paris's most charming, fashionable, and above all witty hostess. It's kind of embarrassing at first: he pretty much stalks her. But, after a while, he manages to get into her highly exclusive social circle, and appreciate all that sparkling esprit at first hand. People sometimes criticize Proust for not being amusing, but this book is the exception. The Duchesse is, in fact, pretty damn funny a lot of the time. I particularly like her éԱDZٳܰ as she comments on the Duc's interminable series of mistresses, and how much trouble they always cause her.
What's both fascinating and rather scary is the way in which Proust then focuses his analytical intelligence on the Duchesse's wit. Instead of just enjoying it, he decides to pick it to pieces. He's almost too successful in this attempt: a good part of me wished he hadn't done it. What was originally sparkling becomes trite and mechanical. She's got a number of formulas, and she rings the changes on them. I shouldn't have looked at the man behind the curtain. It's all part of Proust's overall program, and it's thematic, so I guess I shouldn't complain; the true reward for reading him is supposed to be at a higher level. All the same, it would be nice to get some straightforward pleasure every now and then without him insisting on ruining it immediately afterwards. His analysis reminds me of the following well-known lines from T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral:
Man's life is a cheat and disappointment;I like this passage for the same reason I like Le Côté de Guermantes; it expresses despair in a wonderfully elegant way.
All things are unreal,
Unreal and disappointing:
The Catherine wheel, the pantomime cat,
The prizes given at the children's party,
The prize awarded for the English Essay,
The scholar's degree, the statesman's decoration,
All things become less real, man passes
From unreality to unreality.
___________________________
After posting my review of The Information a couple of days ago, I started to wonder what other books there were which directly address the ŷ experience. It occurred to me that Le Côté de Guermantes was a strong contender. Literary salons have passed into the realm of myth, so you don't immediately recognize one when it comes along, but ŷ does indeed seem to have many of the qualities you find in descriptions from 19th century and early 20th century novels. We're all sitting around trying to dazzle each other with our witty sallies, and there is a definite cachet attached to being friendly with the pickier reviewing stars.
And, just as in Proust, you discover how hard it is to maintain a high standard of esprit. Over and over again, you see the phenomenon he describes here: you're first captivated by someone's brilliant çܲ, then, having become familiar with their style, you start anticipating them. In the end, they become predictable and boring, and you move on to admiring someone else.
I hope I haven't ruined too many people's days by pointing this out, and I'm honestly not thinking of anyone in particular. It's everyone; it's part of the human condition. Damn Proust for noticing that and explaining it so well.
]]>
[By Man'i of Rarotonga]
The Journey of Joenes has been handed down to us from a multitude of traditions spanning the length and breadth of the Pacific, and its ultimate origins are shrouded in mystery. Here, on the beautiful island of Rarotonga, it has been said as long as men can recall that certain details come from the "reviewing site" of "ŷ". What a "reviewing site" is, none can now tell, but some oral scholars identify it with the fabled Library of Alexandria, constructed by Diderot's Encyclopedists and tragically destroyed during the Civil War. Legend has it that the Chief Librarian, Otis, remained after his faithless staff had fled and perished in the flames together with all his paranormal romances. But that is another story.]]>
author: Robert Sheckley
name: Manny
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1962
rating: 3
read at: 2020/08/08
date added: 2024/08/30
shelves: linguistics-and-philosophy, science-fiction, the-goodreads-experience, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, well-i-think-its-funny, parody-homage
review:
The Sources of the Tale
[By Man'i of Rarotonga]
The Journey of Joenes has been handed down to us from a multitude of traditions spanning the length and breadth of the Pacific, and its ultimate origins are shrouded in mystery. Here, on the beautiful island of Rarotonga, it has been said as long as men can recall that certain details come from the "reviewing site" of "ŷ". What a "reviewing site" is, none can now tell, but some oral scholars identify it with the fabled Library of Alexandria, constructed by Diderot's Encyclopedists and tragically destroyed during the Civil War. Legend has it that the Chief Librarian, Otis, remained after his faithless staff had fled and perished in the flames together with all his paranormal romances. But that is another story.
]]>
Q: When is a gate not a gate?
A: [spoilers removed]
ChatGPT-4 gets it at once: [spoilers removed]
___________________
I invented another obscure riddle and told it to ChatGPT-4o. It came up with an answer I hadn't thought of! Which one do you think is better?
Q: What would you call a member of the order Strigiformes that has unaccountably gone missing?
A: [spoilers removed]
A: [spoilers removed]]]>
author: M. Sherbert
name: Manny
average rating: 2.67
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/29
shelves: not-to-read, chat-gpt, well-i-think-its-funny
review:
Q: When is a door not a door?
A: When it is ajar.
Q: When is a gate not a gate?
A: [spoilers removed]
ChatGPT-4 gets it at once: [spoilers removed]
___________________
I invented another obscure riddle and told it to ChatGPT-4o. It came up with an answer I hadn't thought of! Which one do you think is better?
Q: What would you call a member of the order Strigiformes that has unaccountably gone missing?
A: [spoilers removed]
A: [spoilers removed]
]]>
Oh, if only AIs were able to understand things in a human-like way and had a sense of humour!]]>
author: George Brook
name: Manny
average rating: 5.00
book published: 2015
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/27
shelves: to-read, chat-gpt
review:
Academia's strategy for dealing with the rising tide of Artificial Intelligence reminds me of something. ChatGPT-4o was happy to draw the cartoon below:
Oh, if only AIs were able to understand things in a human-like way and had a sense of humour!
]]>
This zany tale of upholsterosis (a chronic state of couch-potato-ness) is sure to tickle the funny bones of young readers—and not-so-young-readers too!]]>
Aria del Divano
“L’Intesa Segreta�
(“The Secret Understanding�)
Oh, mio padrone, signore del mio cuore,
sul mio velluto, ogni tua carezza dolce si posa.
Sono il rifugio, la tua dimora segreta,
quel posto che solo tu conosci, senza parole.
Oh, come sussurri, con mani forti e tenere,
ogni fibra mia risponde al tuo tocco divino.
Su di me ti abbandoni, nei tuoi pensieri profondi,
e io ti accolgo, nelle mie braccia silenziose.
Non sono solo un pezzo di legno e stoffa,
ma il tuo confidente, un’anima nascosta.
Sento il battito del tuo cuore nel mio,
e nelle notti lunghe, siamo due in un solo respiro.
La tua presenza riempie il mio spazio vuoto,
ti accolgo sempre, con desiderio sincero.
Sono il tuo porto, il tuo dolce rifugio,
nel mondo caotico, siamo uniti, sereni.
Oh, se solo potessi parlare, rivelare il mio amore,
ma il mio linguaggio è il silenzio, il mio canto è l’attesa.
Nel segreto dei nostri incontri, trovo la mia gioia,
perché con te, mio signore, sono finalmente completa.
and in the video you can hear the first verse dramatically sung by Udio.
AIs have a weird sense of humour! I'm still trying to figure it out.]]>
author: David Slonim
name: Manny
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2005
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/22
shelves: to-read, donalds-are-trumps, chat-gpt, spanish-and-italian, well-i-think-its-funny, why-not-call-it-poetry
review:
For reasons best known to themselves, my AI friends have written an aria, in Italian, from an opera about a passionate affair between a man and a couch. Here are the full lyrics as composed by ChatGPT-4o:
Aria del Divano
“L’Intesa Segreta�
(“The Secret Understanding�)
Oh, mio padrone, signore del mio cuore,
sul mio velluto, ogni tua carezza dolce si posa.
Sono il rifugio, la tua dimora segreta,
quel posto che solo tu conosci, senza parole.
Oh, come sussurri, con mani forti e tenere,
ogni fibra mia risponde al tuo tocco divino.
Su di me ti abbandoni, nei tuoi pensieri profondi,
e io ti accolgo, nelle mie braccia silenziose.
Non sono solo un pezzo di legno e stoffa,
ma il tuo confidente, un’anima nascosta.
Sento il battito del tuo cuore nel mio,
e nelle notti lunghe, siamo due in un solo respiro.
La tua presenza riempie il mio spazio vuoto,
ti accolgo sempre, con desiderio sincero.
Sono il tuo porto, il tuo dolce rifugio,
nel mondo caotico, siamo uniti, sereni.
Oh, se solo potessi parlare, rivelare il mio amore,
ma il mio linguaggio è il silenzio, il mio canto è l’attesa.
Nel segreto dei nostri incontri, trovo la mia gioia,
perché con te, mio signore, sono finalmente completa.
and in the video you can hear the first verse dramatically sung by Udio.
AIs have a weird sense of humour! I'm still trying to figure it out.
]]>
author: Naomi Kritzer
name: Manny
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2017
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: to-read
review:
]]>
Roxie:
I’m sick of yous telling me what to do! I’m a big star and you treat me like some dumb common criminal!
Billy:
You ARE some dumb common criminal.]]>
author: Fred Ebb
name: Manny
average rating: 4.22
book published: 1981
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/21
shelves: donalds-are-trumps, too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, well-i-think-its-funny, why-not-call-it-poetry
review:
This razor-sharp satire on the US just gets funnier and funnier. Roxie Hart shoots her lover in cold blood when he tries to break up with her, then her lawyer convinces the jury that she did it to save the life of her non-existent unborn child and gets her off the hook. Special prize for the following exchange:
Roxie:
I’m sick of yous telling me what to do! I’m a big star and you treat me like some dumb common criminal!
Billy:
You ARE some dumb common criminal.
]]>
The Abuse of Power is a searing exposé of injustice and an impassioned call to exercise power for the greater good. Drawing on examples from domestic and international affairs she was personally involved in at the highest level, including Stop and Search and the Salisbury Poisonings, the former prime minister argues for a radical rethink in how we approach our politics and public life.]]>
1. Read the following passage carefully. Which part do you think came from the final chapter of Theresa May's book The Abuse of Power, and which was added by the examiner?
The key for me is that the Prime Minister should still be able to decide who sits as a minister in their government. If they insist on continuing with a minister who has broken the code, of course it brings their own behaviour into question. More than that, it would not be forgotten by the opposition or the electorate. It is unfortunate that we have to look at changes like this, but the system was designed to be operated by people of good intent and integrity. If that comes into question, then change is the next step.2. Why?
Overall behaviour by MPs is governed by the Nolan Principles, which I referred to earlier. These are selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. While these are generally known, I don't think enough is done to ensure that everyone who is elected understands the importance of abiding by them. Speaking from my own experience, I bitterly regret appointing to my cabinet Boris Johnson, a sociopathic liar who flouted all seven of the Nolan Principles at every available opportunity and caused untold damage both to his party and to his country.
Answers
1. [spoilers removed]
2. [spoilers removed]
_________________
But seriously...
I found this book exasperating. Theresa May had her heart in the right place, and she did some admirable things. It's worthwhile to read about them. But she completely failed to understand the central issues. She keeps talking about compromise and seeing the other side's point of view. But in the case of people like Trump, their point of view is that they want to abolish democracy. Compromising with such people is just weakness.
She says in so many words that that's the right way to deal with Putin. Somehow she fails to grasp that it's also the right way to deal with Putin's allies. She can't believe it's happening in so-called enlightened Western countries, despite the abundant evidence that it is. Hello? January 6? How can it get more obvious?
At the end of the day, she comes across as simply not very bright.]]>
author: Theresa May
name: Manny
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2024/08/16
date added: 2024/08/18
shelves: history-and-biography
review:
Twenty-first Century British Politics. Ten minutes.
1. Read the following passage carefully. Which part do you think came from the final chapter of Theresa May's book The Abuse of Power, and which was added by the examiner?
The key for me is that the Prime Minister should still be able to decide who sits as a minister in their government. If they insist on continuing with a minister who has broken the code, of course it brings their own behaviour into question. More than that, it would not be forgotten by the opposition or the electorate. It is unfortunate that we have to look at changes like this, but the system was designed to be operated by people of good intent and integrity. If that comes into question, then change is the next step.2. Why?
Overall behaviour by MPs is governed by the Nolan Principles, which I referred to earlier. These are selflessness, integrity, objectivity, accountability, openness, honesty and leadership. While these are generally known, I don't think enough is done to ensure that everyone who is elected understands the importance of abiding by them. Speaking from my own experience, I bitterly regret appointing to my cabinet Boris Johnson, a sociopathic liar who flouted all seven of the Nolan Principles at every available opportunity and caused untold damage both to his party and to his country.
Answers
1. [spoilers removed]
2. [spoilers removed]
_________________
But seriously...
I found this book exasperating. Theresa May had her heart in the right place, and she did some admirable things. It's worthwhile to read about them. But she completely failed to understand the central issues. She keeps talking about compromise and seeing the other side's point of view. But in the case of people like Trump, their point of view is that they want to abolish democracy. Compromising with such people is just weakness.
She says in so many words that that's the right way to deal with Putin. Somehow she fails to grasp that it's also the right way to deal with Putin's allies. She can't believe it's happening in so-called enlightened Western countries, despite the abundant evidence that it is. Hello? January 6? How can it get more obvious?
At the end of the day, she comes across as simply not very bright.
]]>
I wonder if you could create an illustration to accompany this very fine poem by T.S. Eliot?
Cat Morgan Introduces Himself
I once was a Pirate what sailed the 'igh seas -
But now I've retired as a com-mission-aire:
And that's how you find me a-taking' my ease
And keepin' the door in a Bloomsbury Square.
I'm partial to partridges, likewise to grouse,
And I favour that Devonshire cream in a bowl;
But I'm allus content with a drink on the 'ouse
And a bit o' cold fish when I done me patrol.
I ain't got much polish, me manners is gruff,
But I've got a good coat, and I keep meself smart;
And everyone says, and I guess that's enough:
You can't but like Morgan, 'e's got a kind 'art.'
I got knocked about on the Barbary Coast,
And me voice it ain't no sich melliferous horgan;
But yet I can state, and I'm not one to boast,
That some of the gals is dead keen on old Morgan.
So if you 'ave business with Faber - or Faber -
I'll give you this tip, and it's worth a lot more:
You'll save yourself time, and you'll spare yourself labour
If just you make friends with the Cat at the door.
ChatGPT-4o:
Here's the illustration of Cat Morgan based on the poem "Cat Morgan Introduces Himself" by T.S. Eliot. I hope it captures the whimsical charm and rugged character of Cat Morgan as you envisioned!]]>
author: T.S. Eliot
name: Manny
average rating: 3.57
book published:
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2024/08/17
shelves: chat-gpt, well-i-think-its-funny, why-not-call-it-poetry
review:
mannyrayner:
I wonder if you could create an illustration to accompany this very fine poem by T.S. Eliot?
Cat Morgan Introduces Himself
I once was a Pirate what sailed the 'igh seas -
But now I've retired as a com-mission-aire:
And that's how you find me a-taking' my ease
And keepin' the door in a Bloomsbury Square.
I'm partial to partridges, likewise to grouse,
And I favour that Devonshire cream in a bowl;
But I'm allus content with a drink on the 'ouse
And a bit o' cold fish when I done me patrol.
I ain't got much polish, me manners is gruff,
But I've got a good coat, and I keep meself smart;
And everyone says, and I guess that's enough:
You can't but like Morgan, 'e's got a kind 'art.'
I got knocked about on the Barbary Coast,
And me voice it ain't no sich melliferous horgan;
But yet I can state, and I'm not one to boast,
That some of the gals is dead keen on old Morgan.
So if you 'ave business with Faber - or Faber -
I'll give you this tip, and it's worth a lot more:
You'll save yourself time, and you'll spare yourself labour
If just you make friends with the Cat at the door.
ChatGPT-4o:
Here's the illustration of Cat Morgan based on the poem "Cat Morgan Introduces Himself" by T.S. Eliot. I hope it captures the whimsical charm and rugged character of Cat Morgan as you envisioned!
]]>
Written in 1953, The Crucible is a mirror Miller uses to reflect the anti-communist hysteria inspired by Senator Joseph McCarthy's "witch-hunts" in the United States. Within the text itself, Miller contemplates the parallels, writing, "Political opposition... is given an inhumane overlay, which then justifies the abrogation of all normally applied customs of civilized behavior. A political policy is equated with moral right, and opposition to it with diabolical malevolence."
WIth an introduction by Christopher Bigsby.
(back cover)]]>
The focus of the story is John Proctor's struggle to redeem himself from the horrible guilt he has suffered since committing adultery with Abigail. This is indeed very moving. But for some reason, the part I think of most often is a detail concerning one of the minor characters, Giles Corey, who dies offstage halfway through. Giles is one of many citizens falsely accused of witchcraft by Abigail and those who are exploiting her. He is an impossible situation; irrespective of whether he pleads guilty or innocent, he is doomed. But Giles has a long history of litigation and knows the law very well. He simply refuses to enter any plea at all.
They fetch huge stones and lay them on top of him, to force him to say something. But the only words he ever utters are "More weight". And so he dies uncompromised and his farm is inherited by his children. The person telling the story finishes and adds, "It was a fearsome man, Giles Corey".
_____________________
I just looked it up on Wikipedia; apparently it's all true. is very good.]]>
author: Arthur Miller
name: Manny
average rating: 3.60
book published: 1953
rating: 5
read at: 1974/01/01
date added: 2024/08/12
shelves:
review:
This is a magnificent play about what happens when hysteria takes over a society and evil people gain access to the levers of power; something, alas, which happens all too frequently.
The focus of the story is John Proctor's struggle to redeem himself from the horrible guilt he has suffered since committing adultery with Abigail. This is indeed very moving. But for some reason, the part I think of most often is a detail concerning one of the minor characters, Giles Corey, who dies offstage halfway through. Giles is one of many citizens falsely accused of witchcraft by Abigail and those who are exploiting her. He is an impossible situation; irrespective of whether he pleads guilty or innocent, he is doomed. But Giles has a long history of litigation and knows the law very well. He simply refuses to enter any plea at all.
They fetch huge stones and lay them on top of him, to force him to say something. But the only words he ever utters are "More weight". And so he dies uncompromised and his farm is inherited by his children. The person telling the story finishes and adds, "It was a fearsome man, Giles Corey".
_____________________
I just looked it up on Wikipedia; apparently it's all true. is very good.
]]>
Sigh... once again, the cure turns out to be worse than the disease.
]]>
author: Jules Verne
name: Manny
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1872
rating: 2
read at: 1968/01/01
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: children
review:
The twist at the end is so ridiculous and implausible that it prompted Philip Jose Farmer to rewrite the story as . The details have mercifully been erased from my memory, but I believe Fogg and friends are late getting to the club because they've been engaged in an extended ray-gun battle with their nefarious enemies.
Sigh... once again, the cure turns out to be worse than the disease.
]]>
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]>
author: Margaret Cavendish
name: Manny
average rating: 3.26
book published:
rating: 0
read at:
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves: to-read
review:
]]>