multijimbo

Earlier this month, I was listening to the future robot avatars of Emma Newman and Adrian Tchaikovsky aboard their podcast, the Starship Alexandria (which I highly recommend). They were discussing The Golden Apples of the Sun, a collection of short stories from Ray Bradbury.

One of the stories was A Sound of Thunder, one of the most famous of stories, originally published in 1952. Interestingly, it wasn’t until 1963 that Edward Lorenz undertook the work that produced a first noted demonstration of deterministic chaos, which is in some sense the formal mathematical underpinning of this idea of small differences at the beginning result in large differences later on.

I suppose there there is also the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory, or Everett interpretation, which dates to 1957, which could be seen as a different interpretation of the story.

But this isn’t the thing my brain did. When I was an undergraduate, oh so many years ago now, we were given the poem Ozymandias by Shelley to read and interpret. I had not read the poem before, had not encountered it, and so didn’t know the standard interpretation. I don’t remember what it was I said, but it wasn’t the standard.

It’s times like this that make me wish I had kept some of my old school and university notes, so that I could look back and see what it was I said, but moving across an ocean persuades someone not to keep too many things.

But during the podcast, I remembered a line from Night Moves, a 1976 Bob Seger song. ‘I woke last night to the sound of thunder.’ It’s a song I know well; it was a standard part of radio play when I was growing up, and it was a song I was always happy to hear, the story of two young people who were restless and bored.

Could we, my brain said, reinterpret the entire song along the lines of A Sound of Thunder? For most of the story, I think the answer is no, at least among reasonable interpretations. But there is the one verse where it might be possible.

I woke last night to the sound of thunder
how far off I sat and wondered
started humming a song from nineteen sixty two
aint it funny how the night moves
when just don’t seem to have as much to lose
strange how the night moves
with autumn closing in

This verse almost works. It would have been a bit more intriguing if the song he’d been humming was from 1952, the year A Sound of Thunder was published, but alas the world is imperfect.

How wide should we sometimes cast our interpretations? On the one hand it’s clear that there is no reasonable way to interpret this song as a vision of an alternate world. But on the other, it’s fun to see how far we can go. I keep singing that line, ever hopeful that something more will come to me. Oh how strange the night moves.

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As I’ve done before, I’m contemplating habits. A habit is an interesting thing. We each have habits that we acquire over time, often without consciously attempting to. One day, we wake up and we realize that we have been carrying the weight of the habits we’re accumulated.

On the other hand, it can be remarkably difficult to embed a new habit. Even when we think we have the time, something else seems to fill the space.

And so it becomes something of a game of tug and war. One day we clear out some time, the next day something fills that space we thought we’d created. Or at least, this is what I’ve found over the years.

And so what to do? There is only one thing to do, and I’m reminded of an old quote from Yoda: There is only do and not do; there is no try. It’s a particularly Zen-like quote, at least for me. Seemingly simple on the face of it, both intuitive and counter-intuitive, and yet it always has something more to offer as we contemplate.

And so I think my path is simple. I stop trying. I stop trying to implement new habits. I stop trying to change. Instead, I do, or I don’t do. I change, or I accept how I am. I implement a new habit, or I don’t. It’s going to be a hard road, but what else can I do/

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I like cooking shows. But not the ‘here’s a recipe and here’s how to make it’ shows. I like gladiatorial cooking shows – Top Chef is coming to the end of season 22, and I’ve just finished season 2 of 24 in 24 Last Chef Standing (which I find to be a delightfully bonkers show in its basic concept). There’s Iron Chef, Next Level Chef, Chopped, Hell’s Kitchen, Barbecue Showdown, Culinary Class Wars and many many (many) others.

Those close to me have gotten used to me bringing them up in conversation from time to time, as they do form one of my touch points, along with the first 10 or so seasons of the Simpsons and classic Looney Tunes.

But I’ve been pondering this love I have for these gladiatorial cooking shows. Why, and just how bad is it? One thing to note is that clearly, I’m not alone. Each week seems to bring a new one, and there is the Food Network, and perhaps others as well. And I do like cooking and I enjoy a good meal. Not that I’ve yet tried to cook one of the dishes created in the throes of these competitions, but hope springs eternal.

But I do have this worry in the back of my mind. I think the fertile ground from which this worry sprung is a quote that I only vaguely remember, that civilizations are doomed when they make celebrities of their chefs, and we are well down that road.

But food is an important aspect of our lives. We need to eat. And I also appreciate the skill of the chefs. They train, they spend time, years and decades with their craft, and then they enter an arena, to test their skills and to find out, as sometimes happens, that they know more than they thought they did. And those are great moments.

I’ll admit that I wasn’t sure where this was going to go when I sat down to put some words down. I have an appreciation of the skills of those involved, but I do worry a bit that I am distracting myself from the cares and woes of the world.

Perhaps that’s necessary. Perhaps I’m taking advantage of my place in the world to escape the crush of the news for a bit of time, watching as a chef pulls a great dish out of an ingredient they’d never worked with before.

But I suspect as well that anyone reading this has their own escape, their own thing they keep to avoid the world for a few minutes. To which I can only say, enjoy. Enjoy those moments, and I will go back to the finale of Top Chef next week when I get the notification that it’s waiting for me.

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When I sat down to write on this topic, I realized a number of things. First of all, I’d mentioned this topic, the toolmaker koan, on multiple occasions (I include some of these mentions at the end of this post). This makes sense, because it is one of those ideas that has nested deeply in the attic of my brain. But there are some basic aspects and questions I’ve never addressed.

First of all, is the toolmaker koan in fact a koan? The toolmaker koan is the statement that we humans develop tools much more quickly than we develop the ability to use those tools well. This seems to me to be closer to a statement of naive fact than the standard definition of a koan, which arises from Zen, of being a paradoxical anecdote or riddle without a solution, which has the purpose in Zen of demonstrating the inadequacy of logical argument.

And so I suspect that I’ve misnamed this observation, which is not an observation in any way original to me, though probably one made under many different names. But it’s the name that’s stuck in my mind and so it’s the name that we’ll keep.

Another thing that I’ve never followed up is the connection between this toolmaker koan and doomsday devices, something else that my science fiction brain has pondered from time to time, and this is a direction of enquiry I would like to explore. There are in fact many different directions I want to take, the rise of artificial intelligence which I’ve touched on in previous posts; different inventions as doomsday devices; and what it is we need to do to prevent these observations from in fact becoming paradoxical anecdotes and riddles.

In my mathematical life, I have enjoyed the occasional paradox, and even logical weirdnesses that don’t quite rise to the level of paradox. A good paradox is tightly binding, preventing us from escaping its grasp, and I think that we need to resolve and rise beyond the toolmaker koan, and so what I plan to do over the coming weeks is to explore the toolmaker koan and doomsday devices, and see whether it’s possible to navigate a way through this stormy sea.

So going forward, I’m going to dig into this. This will require some reading around and so might not be quick, but I want to persuade myself that there is a solution, and one less extreme that the Surak moment mentioned earlier.

2022.05.08 reading with hindsight: Superiority and beware the shiny
2023.07.30 further consideration of the Toolmaker Koan
2024.03.03 speculating on Colossus
2024.09.22 the toolmaker koan, revisited yet again

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We are approaching the end of the Gregorian year, the standard calendar we follow here in the UK. As in previous years, I find myself pondering the arbitrariness of calendars.

It makes sense that we mark the passage of the years, because there is a natural cycle to the years. The weather warms, the weather cools, with a large amount of local variation; the day todays started cold but when the clouds retreated and the sun came out, it was almost warm enough to ditch the coat, though keeping on the sweater underneath.

But it’s an interesting question, why have we chosen precisely this moment to mark the transition from one year to the next. I’m sure there are books on the topics, and I’d meant to look them up, apologies for that, but it does bring to mind an old question.

In each of the calendars we have, solar calendars and lunar, for all of the cultures across our world that have years, what are the actual or mythological events that mark the transition between years. There might be an interesting book there, but that’s a project that would require a lot of research and digging, and there are other things that are higher on the list.

And there are things we tend to do when we move from one year to the next. It’s a tempting time to reevaluate lists of projects as yet uncompleted, and to change the habits that we carry with us. This is something that we need to so with some kindness and understanding for ourselves; changing habits can be hard, and it’s not something we’ll be able to do turning on a dime.

So the new Gregorian year begins in just a few days. I have my list of habits to change, old habits to break and new habits to build into my days. I have the projects I want to finish and the ones I want to start and move along. And let’s see what I can get done tomorrow.

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Some time ago, I looked at the long list of accumulated projects, and I decided that the only reasonable decision to make would be to declare project bankruptcy and start over, wiping the slate clean.

And it’s proven more difficult than I thought, for many reasons. One is the sunk cost fallacy. A few of these projects I started a long time ago, years (or even decades in a few cases), and it’s hard to ignore all of that expended effort.

And if I stare in the mirror, there is then the question of why I’ve held onto these projects for so long, without bringing them to a state of completion, and that’s a great question to which I don’t have a good answer. In part, it might be that procrastination becomes a habit in itself and that’s a habit I’ve been practicing, too assiduously.

Another reason perhaps is that some of them are just interesting. With lots of interesting projects, there is the difficulty of focusing on just one of them, leaving all of the others watching from the sidelines. But that then is the discipline to practice this year.

Yet another reason might be that the projects are just interesting, which is why they ended up on the list in the first place.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s the time of year that many people start thinking about resolutions for the year to come. But I don’t like waiting until the new year, and so the time has come to get out the pruning shears and start removing some of these old, dead projects, so that there is room for new projects to bloom.

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When I was younger, I read a lot of science fiction short stories. I would go to used book stores and buy collected stories of individual authors and anthologies, themed and unthemed. I don’t have the ones I collected in high school, but I have I think made up for that in the years since.

One of the stories I remembered reading rang a bell, and I’d been trying to find it. Google helped a bit, once I had a bit more information, but a story involving people who warp reality through their perceptions doesn’t provide enough specification.

Once I’d remembered that it might be a Philip K Dick story, I had two choices. I could go back to Google and ask again, with this additional information, or I could back and reread (rereread? though it has been enough years that the pages have yellowed) his collected stories. In the end, life being busy, I opted for the former option and alighted on Maladjustment.

In summary, parakineticists have emerged among human beings. These are people who have a particular delusion but also have the power to impose their delusion upon the world. In the story, we encounter a few of these P-K individuals. One can fly. One can grow transport craft on a vine in his backyard. One can walk through walls but not fall through floors.

There is an Agency who attempts to keep the P-Ks in check, an all female Agency because all of the P-Ks are men, but when they rightfully target an important industrialist, he decides that the Agency needs to cease.

But they need then a way of keeping the P-Ks in check, and this is where for me the story got interesting. The idea isn’t well developed, but the idea is that we will rely on our collective understanding of reality to spot those individuals who are diverging.

Not meaning to take a sharp left turn here, but there is a reason this story rang a bell. I’ve been listening to a lot of news recently, the world being a complicated place these days, and I’ve come to realize the truth of something I’ve heard from multiple different sources.

One of the impact of the Internet is that our news ecosystem has atomized. I can remember the old days, in the before times, when we had only a few common sources of news. Now we can each find, if we wish, sources for the news and opinion we want to hear, without the news and opinion we don’t.

This atomization of news reflects the fracturing of reality that we see in Maladjustment. The idea that we can use the collective to ride herd on the individual doesn’t work in the story; this is the twist contained in the last line two lines. “A man who grew jet transports from a plant in his backyard was clearly a lunatic. It was so much simpler just to flap one’s arms.”

One of the things I like about reading PKD’s is precisely this. Sometimes the settings feel very dated. Sometimes, the characters can be a bit formulaic or staid. But there is always an idea at the core of the story that will reverberate, an idea that is a mirror in which we can some aspect of our world that requires some focus and attention.

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I’ve always enjoyed reading Stanislaw Lem, and one of my favorite characters of his is the pilot Pirx. As far as I’m aware, Lem wasn’t in any of the novels, but rather he can be found in two collections of stories, Tales of Pirx the Pilot and More Tales of Pirx the pilot. The tales follow Pirx through his career, from rookie pilot to grizzled veteran.

I picked up Tales earlier today and picked a story at random, Albatross. And yes, there will be spoilers. Herein, Pirx is a passenger on a space going luxury cruise liner, on his way to his next job. He notices that the liner and accelerating, and so he makes his way to the main control room. There he finds out that his ship, the Titan Aresterra, along with a handful of other ships, are on a rescue mission to the Albatross, which has suffered a cataclysmic failure.

There is a lot we don’t find out in the story, for instance what happened to the Albatross. What happened to the Dasher, one of the first ships to arrive on the scene, having broken its own engines doing so.

I like the story for the writing, even though Lem does things that I don’t always like in the stories I read. (And yes, I feel a bit as though I’m committing a sin by even writing those words.) Pirx is not directly involved; the Titan gets called off rescue duties as other ships have arrived and she is full of passengers. And even the crew of the Titan are bystanders, and so we’re just watching as they listen to the story of the Albatross unfold over the radio.

But I think part of the reason it rang a chord in me is that I read an article in the Atlantic yesterday, on Point Nemo, the point in the southern Pacific that’s the point on Earth farthest from land. When ships do pass near there, it’s sometimes the case that the nearest other humans are those in the International Space Station passing overhead.

There is mention of Michael Collins, alone on the lunar orbiter when Armstrong and Aldrin have descended to the Moon’s surface, more alone than anyone had ever been.

I was having a conversation with a friend this week just past, about how we each need, every once in a while, a bit of time alone. But this is a very different sort of time alone, because we knew that there are always people near by. There is connection near by.

We are not like the sailors passing through Point Nemo, or the crew of the Albatross, or the astronauts who went to the moon. We can take our hour, or our day, and then walk down the street, alone in our thoughts but not alone in our presence.

I suppose this echoed in me because I’m also thinking about the characters in my half written stories. Some of them are engaged in long voyages and journeys, through barren lands, and I need to think about their sense of loneliness and how that shapes them and their stories. And I will keep coming back to Point Nemo and the Albatross.

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I think a lot about the toolmaker koan; if you’re so minded, some of these earlier speculations can be found HERE.

Loosely, a koan is a Zen device, a short story that’s intended to illustrate a point of Zen. A koan often involves what seems to be an internal contradiction, intended to stimulate consideration. The classic koan is, what is the sound of one hand clapping.

Strictly speaking, the toolmaker koan may not be a koan. Rather, it is a question: why is that the development and use of tools so outpaces the wisdom in the use of tools. This touches on one of those fundamental points that we find in the news a lot these days, in various guises: the difference between whether we can do a thing, versus whether we should.

The thought I had recently during a long drive is the connection between the toolmaker koan and one of the other topics of occasional contemplation, doomsday devices, see THIS and THAT.

I haven’t written about doomsday devices for a long time, though I do have some ideas, but the thought I had was, what do we get when we bring together doomsday devices and the toolmaker koan.

It is an obvious thought, in some ways. Doomsday devices are somehow archetypal tools, vis a vis the toolmaker koan, but strangely the connection between the two hadn’t occurred to me before. And so this is what I’ll be trying to working through over the coming weeks and months. We’ll see where we go with it.

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I know it’s not an actual word, but it nonetheless seems appropriate at this particular moment in time. I’d intended to write about the toolmaker koan, as it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot recently. But the news of the day has taken the wind out of that particular sail.

I still follow US politics, more than I should perhaps, but I think there’s a case that can be made that the politics of the US have a significant impact on the politics of the world, especially the UK and Europe a bit more widely.

I’m curious to watch the news over the next few days and weeks, email newsletters and podcasts and all the other forms the news takes these days, as we all digest this news.

And so, roilations. The roiling, churning seas through which we’re all sailing. There is a lot going on. We’ve spent the afternoon watching news, switching from one channel to another, savoring the new as yet unheard bits of information as they come through.

And so, back to the news, and more later. I suppose every generation thinks they’re living through interesting times. But these times, they do feel especially interesting.

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I wrote the title of this offering to the blogosphere without knowing quite what I meant by this particular sequence of words. Both of my countries, the country of my birth and the country where I live, are undergoing elections this year, one sooner than the other. While the outcome of one of these (the UK election) seems at the moment to be relatively clear, he said not wanting to tempt fate, the outcome of the other (the US election) seems anything but certain.

This uncertainty is hard to bear sometimes. It’s the weight on the shoulders, the tight twitching muscle in the lower back, the running shadow glimpsed out of the corner of the eye.

So where is the power of uncertainty? Sometimes, uncertainty can be the inspiration to action; this very much in evidence in the US at the moment. Money is being raised. Articles are being written. Talking heads on various television networks prognosticate and punditize. There are dangers to this nagging by uncertainty; it is hard to remain calm; to carefully, forensically pull apart policies and positions on issues. Loud voices, clamoring for action in the face of various disasters, rise above the quiet chaos of churning uncertainty, and it is hard to find a true path through.

So what are the enemies, the opposites of uncertainty. Certainty can lead to complacency, and complacency is so often the shackles around the ankles of action. I’m reminded of the writings of Carlos Castaneda and the quest to become a person of knowledge. If memory serves, the second enemy (after fear) is clarity. One can become blinded with seeing the world as it is, and not continue along the path.

The world as it is. This is a bit of a sudden left turn into an elsewhere, but it is difficult these days to stare the world in the face, to see the world as it is. The world is (and has always been) a complicated place, but the seeming clarity that the world wore in the early 1990s has now well and truly shown its true self.

Uncertainty reigns, and it is hard to navigate this particular uncertainty. This is not an uncertainty that nags one to action, but rather an uncertainty that erodes and corrodes, and it’s hard to see how to steer our ship. But steer we must. So I’ll watch the news and I’ll continue to read, and I’ll choose my direction of travel. Perhaps we’ll meet along the way.

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I found myself standing today at a confluence of reflective moments. One of these was my continuing exploration of old lists, and the idea I found there, an old one that might well have found its way onto my list via an episode of Start Trek: The Next Generation.

Another is just the passage of time and the reflection on what might have been versus what was. I recognize that the was cannot be changed, but there is still, still the glimmer of the if only that I can’t entirely put to rest.

And so now, the what. If I had the opportunity to write a letter to the younger me, that they could read at 15 or 18 or 21, what would I say? And yes, I’ve read enough science fiction to recognize that the pollution of the time line becomes a problem at this point, and I’m going to ignore that entirely.

I’ve never sat down to write such a letter, but it is an interesting exercise to sit in a quiet room, perhaps in front of a fire if the night is cold, perhaps with a glass of wine, and speculate on what such a letter might contain.

One realization that might hit first is that I don’t remember those days of my life all that well in their detail. I have an inventory of particular moments that I’ve carried with me, but I don’t know whether that inventory contains those events that affected the course of my days, to where I am now. There are some that looking back, I would take a different path, and others where I might not. And it may be that my change might be less events than application and approach.

Beyond this, though, is the deeper lesson. Each day, we are different than we were the day before and we are different than we will be the day after. Each day, we can change our direction of travel.

This can become difficult as we get older, as we become set in our ways, as the accumulated detritus of our days hinders change. And this for me is the lesson from this quiet contemplation. This is the mountain we climb.

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I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts recently. In part, this is just because I’ve gotten behind in listening to those to which I’ve subscribed. In part, this is because of the old ‘kid in the candy store’ phenomenon, wherein the sweets in every jar on the counter are in and of themselves, fascinating.

Some of my current list are fiction, some are non-fiction; some are very regular, others are to different degrees irregular; are though are still welcome, since if they weren’t, they wouldn’t remain on the list.

All of this listening, sometimes though not always while doing something else that doesn’t require my entire brain, has led me to speculate. And as with many of my speculations, I’m sure, willing to bet money sure, that there are PhD theses on this topic out in the world, answering any question I might craft in these idle speculations.

Listening is easy and reading is hard. This is an anecdotal claim at best, but looking around, I think that we spend a lot of time listening while we’re doing something else. We might have a conversation while talking to someone; we might be taking part in an on-line meeting, taking care of old emails and updating Amazon orders while keeping one ear in the meeting.

This isn’t to say that we’re listening well. We are in such situations just keeping that ear out for the mention of things that we’re most concerned about.

Yes, listening well is hard. Being the attentive partner to someone else’s speculations takes work, as rewarding as it is. But we can pay some attention via listening while doing other things.

For me, reading is different. Reading requires focus which is disturbed by background music, television, but strangely not the white noise chatter of a coffee shop.

Beyond this, I wonder whether we process the information we acquire from reading and from listening differently. I’m sure that we must. I have no formal evidence for this, no proof, but I do have my own experience, for what that’s worth. I can listen to a podcast while walking down the street, while I can’t read a book while walking down the street.

Perhaps this is just one part of a much larger phenomenon, with this at one end and the awkward conversations we sometimes have about the difference between the books we’ve read and the movies made from them. Something to ponder.

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Let me start by wishing everyone a belated happy new Gregorian year. The history of years is itself a fascinating thing; perhaps that’s something to add to the ever growing list of things to consider and look into and read about.

There is a beguiling arbitrariness to where we set the beginnings and ends of years. If the orbit of the Earth around the sun were a perfect circle (which it isn’t), then there would be no one point on its orbit that would be distinguishable from any other point and the arbitrariness would be complete. But even with the orbit of the Earth being (essentially) an ellipse, there are distinguishable points on its orbit (from the lore of conic sections), but these aren’t the points we’ve chosen. And so there is something to look into here.

But that’s something for another day. There is a cultural tradition of sorts to set resolutions for the new year, changes of behavior that we wish to implement for ourselves.

We begin the year with the resolutions fresh and bright in our minds, but like a beleaguered prime minister in a race of endurance against a head of lettuce, they fade quickly as the days pass.

As we stand here on the verge of the second week of the new year, it makes some sense to ponder this cultural tradition. I have a few resolutions that are already fading, and I suspect that others might as well.

One thing I’m querying is this habit of making resolutions at a point in the year when we tend to be busy with things, family visits for instance and other calls on our time. Changing habits is difficult. Introducing new habits bring with it one set of challenges, while breaking old habits brings a different set of challenges, and those two sets of challenges are somewhat orthogonal.

And all we can do is to work through them. For me, going back to a recent piece, I’m trying to start over. I’m taking the projects I’ve given myself over recent years and I’m conducting an inventory of what should remain on the list and what should be left off. And so I’m giving myself some time and some space to decide, what are my resolutions for the year and what are then my projects that will arise from these resolutions.

And one of the difficulties with this is that I keep finding things that are interesting, and I keeping being reminded that finding and asking an interesting question (going back to the above) is far easier and far quicker than answering those questions, and so do we begin the new year.

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Memory is a fickle thing. I’ve been doing some house cleaning recently, of the house in which I grew up, and while doing so I found lots of clothes hangers and paperclips, alligator clips and other office supply ephemera. And all of this brought to mind a story I remembered, by Avram Davidson.

So I dug around and found a copy, and it’s not nearly as strange a story as I remember it being. I have this vague memory of reading collected short stories of Davidson and them being very strange, and perhaps some of the ones I haven’t yet reread are very strange, but perhaps it’s just that my personal threshold is a lot higher than it used to be, from lots of reading.

The basic idea of the story is that there is an animal, whose life cycle goes from safety pins to coat hangers to bicycles, and the ebbs and flow of generations is why we sometimes cannot find a safety pin when we were sure we had many, or why there are so many abandoned bicycles on the side of the road.

The bit I’d misremembered were the safety pins. For some reason I thought it was paperclips, which is why my recent house cleaning experience brought the story to mind.

It’s always a strange experience reading a story from long ago; this particular story was written before I was born, around 1962, The story felt a bit old, in terms of the language, but it also felt a bit archaic, in terms of how the social interactions among the characters are described.

I can see though why the story struck in my memory, albeit imperfectly. Like many others, as gauged by the success of shows such as the X-files and Fringe, contemplate the possibility that there is something beyond the things we standardly see, and for me I can understand why.

We as humans have only been diligent in our exploration of the world around us, far and near, for few thousand years. Our ancient ancestors knew a great many things, and I keep being amazed at the articles in science magazines about what the ancients were capable of, but the world, the universe, is a vast and mysterious place, and we are to some extent bound by what we have witnessed and experienced in our local patch of the universe.

One example of this is the science coming out of the JWST and the observations we’re now able to make about the early history of the universe, and how we keep finding things that seem to test or challenge our current understanding of those early days of the everything that is.

And so why shouldn’t there be things that we have just overlooked, much closer to our own daily experiences. And this gets back to one of the reasons I like reading, particularly short stories, because they are such wonderful exercises of imagination and possibility.

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I’ve spent some time recently helping my sisters pack up the house we grew up in. It was an emotional experience, but I’m still unpacking that (no pun intended) (probably) and want to take this particular perambulation in a different direction.

One of our early tasks was to pack up the books, and there were a lot of books, to go off to their new homes. In doing so, I was struck by just how efficient shelves are.

This is not a particularly notable observation, but it did ring with me. Part of that efficiency is that books are heavy and one shelf can handle enough books to make a box heavy to lift. And there was much lifting. But beyond that, shelves are efficient in their tidiness; a few reasonably sized shelves give rise to a small pyramid of boxes.

At this middle stage of my life, I have some reasonably nice shelves around the house, and more books than can fit comfortably upon them. But what to do about this is a different question, and again one I won’t address here.

Earlier in my life, I had crude shelves, boards and cinderblocks, and shelves are something that we are all familiar with and may not give a second thought to. But what’s the history of shelving? What is the archaeological evidence for the persistence of shelving through human permanent settlements?

I’m sure there is a niche of scholarly activity wherein people spend their time packing and unpacking the human history of shelving, and I may have to do some exploration of that scholarly activity, because I’m curious.

After all, we are coming to understand our earlier human selves more and more deeply as time goes on, how they lived and how they furnished their permanent settlements, and I wonder now whether we have some estimate of when shelving first appeared.

But beyond that, I now need to go back and look at how I use my shelves. Books, yes many books, and other things, nicknacks and things collected over many years, some of which have been tucked away behind other things.

And so, shelves. Good things, shelves. Useful. Overpacked. Carrying the weight of memories that we’ve accumulated over the years. Viva the shelf.

Posted in bizarre and random things

I keep coming back to the Toolmaker Koan. I’ve written about this before HERE (and perhaps elsewhere). But the koan is basically the observation that the ability to make tools seems to outpace the capacity, the understanding to use those tools well.

We are developing, and have developed, some incredibly powerful tools, whether we use a limited definition of tool or a broad definition. I’ve been reading a lot about the machine learning tools we’ve been developing, such as the large language models that machinize a strange global average of language.

There is a lot of speculation about what impact these large language models and their successors will have on current human civilization. I work in one of the professions, education, that is sometimes mentioned as one of the professions at risk, with speculation such as individual artificial intelligences for each person, developing and monitoring their own individual educational journey.

We will spend the next few years working through the implications of this particular tool, hoping that we don’t find ourselves in a Skynet or Colossus scenario. But there are other tools.

There is the classic tool that provokes thoughts of survival or destruction: the fission bomb and its bigger, angrier cousin, the fusion bomb. I won’t spend much time here, because we’ve been living with this for decades now.

There are many directions we can go from here. One is to broaden the definition of tool. We are experiencing at the moment interesting consequences of the limited liability corporation, and I think the corporation is a fascinating tool.

One idea here is that the corporation is a form of artificial (perhaps collective) intelligence. We act as individuals, but we also act as part of this larger organization, which as its own goals, which might be goals with longer time lines than individual human lives.

So many tools to consider. And right now, I’m watching Unknown: Cave of Bones on Netflix, thinking about stone tools and the the earliest amongst us who had captured fire. And perhaps even ritual as one of our earliest tools. There is so much we don’t know and we will never know.

But I do think this is one of the fundamental questions for us to consider. How do we use well the tools we develop.

Posted in bizarre and random things

A few years ago, I wrote about a 1970 movie I find myself coming back to from time to time, Colossus the Forbin Project. What struck me today was not the naïveté of the creators of Colossus and Guardin, but rather the prescience of the movie, and the books it’s taken from, in setting forth the emergence of new properties.

In the movie, this emergence comes at the beginning; the extent to which Colossus begins almost immediately to exceed the expectations of its human creators, amazingly without causing panic. This is the theme that drives the movie, that Colossus is more that was was created, and the humans never catch up to how Colossus is growing.

One key moment of this emergence of capabilities is the moment that Colossus makes use of the tools available to it, to enforce its demands. And when Colossus decides not to answer.

The reason this struck home with me today is the almost constant speculation in the news and commentary about the unexpected emergent properties of our current artificial intelligence systems, as well as the speculation about the danger of continued development.

I will admit that I don’t see the development stopping or even slowing down. As has become obvious, we humans can be short sighted in our thinking, chasing the shiny at the expense of running into the road, into oncoming traffic.

But I suspect we’ll continue to experience unexpected emergent properties of the systems we develop, and this should also not surprise us. We are creating systems where we understand the basic shape of the system, but the details of the system are beyond the ability of our human minds to contain. I suspect the systems we build will continue to surprise us, and we should not be surprised by those surprises.

Another interesting aspect of this is that we saw this possibility, decades ago. Runaway robots, Colossus, Hal and all the others, they were Cassandras of sorts, ghosts from the dark corners of our imaginations, perhaps now brought to life by our hands. Interesting, isn’t it, the extent to which we don’t pay attentions to our own stories.

Posted in bizarre and random things