Imagining new religions must be hard work

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space fiction, warfare, politics, religion

In the course of time I have exhausted the local library's stock of recent books with a science theme. Furthermore, in the past year, the number of new acquisitions for the 500 Dewey Decimal section has dwindled from five or more per month to one at most. Thus, to keep up my reading pace of about a book per week, I have taken up a few stratagems: 

• Purchase e-books online.
• Choose carefully among the rest of the Dewey Decimal System.
• Choose even more carefully in the fiction collection. While I prefer collections of short stories, an occasional science fiction novel will attract my attention. I may read a mystery on occasion, otherwise I eschew mainstream fiction and also fantasy.

On this occasion I found Radiant Star by Ann Leckie. The blurb on the cover flap seemed hopeful, and it didn't seem to indicate any "sword and sorcery", which so often creeps in to "fantasize" books touted as science fiction.

I was almost put off by reading the second paragraph: 

"Like other families in the Chath Precinct of Ooioiaa, all the children [of the Consorority of the Translocation] are boys, whatever their personal inclinations. Unlike other families, on reaching adulthood those boys are sorted by the family's matriarch into those who will become women, and hence consorors, and those who will become men. Though Ooioiaan boys may group up to be any gender one may care to imagine, for the boys of the Consorority of the Translocation there are only those two options available."

However, I forged on. Indeed, the book has several interesting ideas. Two in particular stand out. Firstly, the planet Aaa, in which the single city of Ooioiaa is located deep underneath an ice shell, is a rogue planet, coursing through space without a star. One complication of having surface facilities for spacefaring vessels is that planet-native creatures called snowrollers are able to eat whatever metals are used for those facilities, albeit very slowly. This makes them equivalent to corrosion, I suppose, and continued maintenance is required to stave off disastrous accidents.

Secondly, the city is centered on the Translocation of the Radiant Star, and several competing religions have grown up around its worship. One of these is the Chath and two others are named, but their (unpronounceable) names aren't important here. Rather, the mutual suspicion is as expectable as that seen among Catholics, Protestants, and Pentecostals in modern Western society. So is the grasping for wealth under a mask of piety by the religious leaders. Ms Leckie seems to have produced a satirical reflection of the religious landscape she grew up in (Fortunately, she didn't try to extend the metaphor to deal with the 8,000 or so denominations in America, a few hundred of which are to be found in any city of more than 100,000 inhabitants).

Invasion by a superior force is a great way to introduce dramatic tension. The plethora of intrigues already present in Ooioiaa multiply when the Radchaai arrive. The governor is found to be reasonable and comparatively just, in spite of being alternately bemused and aghast at the religious practices around her. Of course, the Radchaai have a religion of their own, and the governor is guardedly tolerant of the Chath and the other Consororities. Though Radiant Star stands alone, it is placed in the conceptual space of the author's Imperial Radch Trilogy. 

After half the book has been spent on setting things up, the big turn arrives when "gates" (similar to Stargate, I suppose) are shut off, and easy communication with other worlds ends. This turns out to be a consequence of civil war in Radch space. Since Ooioiaa exists largely by interworld trade, including many foodstuffs, the result is famine. An infecting organism begins destroying growing crops, particularly one called skel that was imported by the Radchaai. The famine deepens; starvation become the primary cause of death. A struggle ensues over control of access to the Translocation of the Radiant Star. (I was puzzled about how to illustrate this story. I "discussed" it with Gemini, and it brought up several ideas. I elaborated on one, with the result shown here. The two words on the sign are Russian for "riots" and "gunder", which is probably a misspelling of "gender", a loan-word into Russian. It makes sense for Gemini to include it because gender roles and gender confusion run throughout the book, with the author using at least eight sets of pronouns for various unnamed genders.)

A story that plays out across this drama is that of Jonr, a Chath boy who was born to be sent to another planet as a slave. This lends a Disneyesque sheen: an abused or neglected child eventually escapes into either prosperity or freedom. It feels like a cross between Oliver Twist and Star Wars.

I don't know if I would recommend this book to any generally conservative audience (more than half the country, if you're counting). But I enjoyed it. The author looks out the fourth wall sometimes to address us, kind of like the "stage manager" in Our Town, but with more irony. These asides allow her to save space by referring to aspects of the Radch universe without too much explainery. 357 pages is already long enough, if barely enough for the several braided themes found therein.

After a big effort, the spiders slack off

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI agents, AI training

I'm wondering whether to devise a different term than Spiders for the AI agents that are producing all the traffic. I suspect there is less LLM training going on, and more cases of my blog being checked by agentic tools, because I have such an eclectic range of subjects. It is a nice thought. 

I produced this image with Gemini and did no further edit prompting. I could have asked for the text to be removed, but it's cute enough just like it is.

Anyway, have a look at the view stats for the past year:

That big blast lasting nearly two weeks, and which ended about a week ago, represents more than a million views. Then things dropped significantly. However, it's not totally quiet; there are still 10,000 to 15,000 daily views since then. Note that a year ago, most days were in the 1,000 range for most of November and December, with a blip as high as 2,500/day in mid December.

I thought things were crazy when the hash hit in the middle, from March to early August. I don't know what this October Surprise could be. If it was really AI agents, what changed?

Anyone else who's on Blogger, what do your stats show?

Shifting Spycraft

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, espionage, memoirs

When I was an active member of a Toastmasters club, an elderly woman joined. I will call her Carol. Members are encouraged to prepare a 5-minute speech every month or two. Carol did so. Sometimes her speeches were quite memorable. She and her husband were retired from the U.S. State Department, and it became clear that they had been spies. I'll paraphrase her most memorable speech in Toastmasters:

"We were sent to Thailand to surveil a Russian team who had obtained a compound at the edge of a rice paddy. We were able to obtain a small house in a row of houses on the other side. We decided to put a listening device under the Russians' house by pushing a pipe through the ground; once it was installed we would push through stiff wires with a microphone at the end. We dug a trench so that we could pound a pipe along, and screw on new sections as needed. We did the pounding only when there was a lot of traffic on a nearby road, using irregular blows to avoid a patterned sound. Late one winter evening, during the rush hour but after dark, the pounding got very hard, but we persisted as long as we dared. When rush hour ended we stopped for the night. In the morning, we looked out, and saw that the pipe must have hit a rock because it was sticking a couple of feet right out of the ground!"

She didn't say what happened next. Later my wife and I met them at a YMCA event, and I asked about it, but she said some secrets still have to be kept. That is our only contact with spies…that we know about.

More recently, both Andrew and Jihi Bustamante worked for the CIA for several years, and then another dozen years or so training security teams. They founded Everyday Spy, teaching spy skills to help individuals deal with more ordinary matters. They have written Shadow Cell: An Insider Account of America's New Spy War. There they tell of their most significant achievement in the CIA, applying the "cell model" that has long been used most successfully by terrorist networks and the spy operations of some countries; I remember reading decades ago about cell networks in America operated by the USSR. If it works, use it! This is the basis of the "new spy war" and it breaks down the overly bureaucratic stovepipe structure that had arisen in the traditional CIA. 

Andrew and Jihi had worked, separately and together, in what they call Falcon House, where "Falcon" is code for one of the most secretive and paranoid countries (but not quite on the level of North Korea). At first I thought Falcon is an Islamic country because Arab men adore falconry. But the ease of movement of female CIA operatives nixed that idea. Falcon is probably in Asia; there's no need to speculate further. During their work with Falcon they lived in a nearby country, one with the freedom to come and go.

A foundational characteristic of spycraft is to go unnoticed. Memorable people are more likely to be caught. In this regard, I think Andrew is on the edge of being too memorable; from the description by his wife Jihi, he can be bold and loud, even arrogant. In this generated image (DuckDuckGo running GPT Image 2) several couples are visible. Does one stand out? If one couple were spies, it would probably not be that one.

The Bustamantes did not enter Falcon publicly as a couple. They had different roles. He often worked in the field, while she was a target specialist. Another couple, an extremely unmemorable pair, did operate as a couple, with good success. A long section near the end of the book outlines some of Andrew's forays into Falcon, and eventually his almost miraculous escape from capture, more due to bumbling by Falcon officials than his own skills. It ended his usefulness there. But by that time the "shadow cell" had been set up, successfully operating under the principle that only a single person in the Cell could be known to other CIA entities or cells; other cells were set up on the Cell's model once its efficacy became known.

Just as the Bustamantes began operating near and in Falcon, a mole had been detected operating in the CIA, someone who had been "turned" by Falcon's agents. His identity is not revealed in the book, but his eventual discovery and arrest are briefly outlined. While the mole was active, Andrew had to be even more circumspect than usual to avoid exposing the other members of the Cell.

The advice and stories in this book buttressed for me two principles I learned from lectures by police and security trainers: "security by obscurity" and "be a harder target than the next guy". In spy work as in personal security, the opposition isn't perfectly diligent (though in Falcon they come close!), and will often pay more attention to easier prey and sometimes can be distracted.

The astonishing popularity of Einstein

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, facebook, instagram, social media, Albert Einstein

How many people who lived in the early Twentieth Century but passed away before 1960, who are not your own relatives, can you name? Perhaps you wouldn't come up with this name right away, but if someone says it, you remember instantly: Einstein.

Did you know that Albert Einstein still has social media accounts with millions of followers? Not only so, there is still a hot market in Einstein artifacts and memorabilia, including his letters, copies of letters and articles he wrote, and even bobblehead dolls (Podcasting physicist Sabine Hossenfelder keeps an Einstein bobblehead handy in her videos).

The "voice" behind the Facebook page, Instagram site, and other media, writer Benyamin Cohen (titled "Manager of Einstein's Official Social Media Accounts") has written an enjoyable book about the great scientist and his own experiences as the guy behind the scenes: The Einstein Effect: How the World's Favorite Genius Got Into Our Cars, Our Bathrooms, and Our Minds.

Say the word "genius" and most people will think, and usually say, "Einstein." The kid in math class who aces every test gets kidded, "Hey, Einstein, slack off and leave a few decent grades for the rest of us." Whenever you drive to a new place and plot your course on hour phone, or a Garmin or a TomTom, you're using tech with Einstein's math behind it. Use a TV remote, and the IR signal detector behind that tiny black window on your TV is using the photoelectric effect, for which Einstein received the Nobel Prize in 1921. Einstein's explanation for Brownian Motion (the jiggling of pollen grains seen under a microscope) proved the existence of atoms, long before more direct evidence was found. Nuclear energy (and, sad to say, nuclear weapons) have their origin in his most famous equation, E=mc².

To produce around ten posts and pictures daily, Mr. Cohen needs to do constant research. Fortunately, this is easier than in the past, because of the Internet. But he gets in a bit of travel now and again, such as his trip to see what is left of Einstein's brain. The story is much retold, how the medical examiner diced up the brain and took it home in several Mason jars filled with alcohol. Bits have been sent to various researchers over the years, but much is left. Cohen got to see it, at a secret location, meeting someone he just calls Dr. X.

By the way, while it would be nice if Benyamin Cohen were a talented physicist, he isn't any kind of scientist, which he freely admits. As a result, I noticed a number of scientific mistakes in the book, but I would not expect them to detract from the value of the book. I'll mention just one, for the record: when he saw the brain, he writes, "The cerebellum that gave us E=mc² was right there in front of me." Just so you'll know: The cerebellum is the little "bun" at the back of the brain which operates your body; the part that thought up the equation is called the cerebrum. 

It is quite amazing that Einstein is still so popular. Only a few people understand his theories of Relativity. Yes, theories; there are two of them. His popularity is based at least in part on his reputation as a maverick. In just one year, he overturned four areas of "known" scientific theory, with new theories that swallowed up the old ones. The GPS system we use to navigate is based on both theories of Relativity, and I'll try to explain how without getting into the scientific weeds:

First, the Special Theory of Relativity is based on the constant speed of light, no matter how fast things are moving. One result is the way speed affects time. In particular, the GPS satellites in their orbits some 20,000 km overhead (so they orbit the Earth twice daily), are moving fast, so the atomic clock that each satellite carries runs just a bit slow, about 7 microseconds daily.

Secondly, the General Theory of Relativity is based on the way that gravity shapes space, which also affects the passage of time. The altitude of the satellites puts them in a lower gravitational field, so their clock run just a bit fast, about 45 microseconds daily. 

Overall, their clocks run 38 microseconds per day faster than clocks on the surface of Earth. This has to be accounted for in the calculations made by a GPS receiver, or accurate location could not be determined. Thus, GPS, by its very existence, proves the effectiveness of both theories of Relativity.

Mr. Cohen tells a dozen or more aspects of Einstein's continuing effect on our society and culture. Einstein was in on the founding of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which now holds many of his archives and other artifacts. He was a lifelong pacifist. Although he, along with others, urged President Roosevelt to fund the development of the atomic bomb, it was because he knew Germany was determined to develop one, and the scientists realized that America had to do it first, or lose the war. After the use of atomic bombs against Japan, Einstein was aghast at their power. He advocated for denuclearization for the rest of his life.

Albert Einstein was a complex personality. His focus on science came at the expense of his family life. What the book reveals, I don't care to repeat. When he was stuck on the math for a theory, he would either go sailing (and often, get lost) or play violin, to rest his brain. He had his likes and dislikes, but, don't we all? What he liked the most was discovery, the search for truth. I don't know what he would make of an era where a popular mantra is "my truth," but he would certainly understand "fake news." He was not universally loved, but found himself the target of envious attacks and religious attacks because he was a Jew (he didn't practice the religion much, but had a kind of general belief in God, whom he usually called "The Old One.") He typically shrugged it off.

Rather than get into more details, I suggest to everyone to read this book. I greatly enjoyed it.

Spiders getting down to business

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, AI training

What I call spider scanning software seems bent on setting new records. The spiders have buckled down to work! For the past week the average hit rate has been quite steady near one per second.

What do you make of these numbers?

Compare this month (so far) with the prior month. Nearly 7 times the traffic. A full month at one hit per second would come to about 2.6 million. Note that the "All Time" figure goes back to the date that Google Analytics were applied to Blogger, around a decade ago. For more context, here are the charts for the past 30 days, 7 days, 24 hours, and 2 hours.

In the upper two charts, a one-pre-second rate would be 86,400. We see that wasn't quite achieved. In the third chart, it would be 3,600 per hour, and in the last, 60 per minute. The last couple of hours before I obtained these charts, we see that a sustained rate of 80 per minute is possible; that's 1.33 per second, 4,800 per hour, 115,200 per day, and 3,456,000 per 30 days (or a bit more than 3.5 million per average month). In a few days it will be more clear how this is progressing.

Meanwhile, I'm interested in "where?". Here are the 7 day and one day top countries:

For the most recent full day, USA is running at about half its rate for the prior six days. Otherwise, these top 9 actors are the same for both periods. It is an odd mix. Although I mostly attribute this level of activity to a combination of AI training and AI agent lookups, I really can't be sure.

By looking at a list of the most "popular" posts in the different time periods, it is still true, as I reported earlier, that page-by-page views only constitute a few percent. Most of these views are front page only, with the understanding that the most recent ten to fifteen posts are presented in their entirety, and a "Load Older Posts" button brings up the next group, and so forth. That means the entire blog can be reached with fewer than 200 clicks, clicks which do not add to the totals for individual posts.

I'm curious: to any folks who read this, who use Blogger, please check in your stats to see if there are patterns similar to what I am seeing, and leave comments. Thanks!

A possibly futile obsession

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, psychologists, parapsychologists, parapsychology, reincarnation

Disclaimer: The book being reviewed dwells on the subject of reincarnation and one physician's study of whether our minds can exist without a living brain, either in an afterlife or as a reincarnated person. I am a Christian, and similar questions are of great interest to those who believe the Bible. I do not oppose the work done by the subject of the book. I do have a different perspective on the experimental and observational results he obtained, which I will present in due time.

Dr. Ian Stevenson was a genius, with a solid combination of piercing intellectual skills and unflagging energy. For much of his life he was a practicing physician and psychologist. Over time he devoted more and more attention and energy to ascertaining whether the mind survives the death of the brain. He also led the Society for Psychical Research for a time and was a lifelong member, and in midlife cut short a fruitful administrative career to found the Division of Parapsychology at the University of Virginia, now called the Division of Personality Studies. The latter name was Dr. Stevenson's desire, to sidestep opposition to a major university having an endowed chair with the name Para-anything. But those in the campus administration who opposed his work would have none of it: they wanted it out in the open, in hopes a future administration would axe the whole project. 

One wrinkle: Dr. Stevenson was supported for much of his life by Chester Carlson, the inventor of xerography and founder of Xerox. Carlson's money shielded the doctor from much of the opposition and enabled him to work practically unfettered for decades. In particular, he traveled a great deal, including to countries such as India where belief in reincarnation was a part of the local culture.

As we find in The Incredible Afterlives of Dr. Stevenson: One Scientist's Epic Quest for Evidence of Reincarnation, Apparitions, Poltergeists, and Other Matters of the Soul, by Jesse Bering (a research psychologist and professor in his own right), Dr. Stevenson's efforts yielded a great mass of material. Whether it counts as "evidence" is still much in contention. On one side, wishful thinkers and "true believers" over-advocate for their point of view, and materialists and skeptics argue just as strongly for theirs. Both point to the same thing: the many anecdotal cases with clearly astounding details, buried in a mass of less definitive and even contradictory cases, plus a lack of clear experimental evidence, at least in the view of the skeptics, that any of the contentions of psychics could be valid.

Ian was an odd fellow in a few ways. One was his tendency to write about himself, in his own journals, in the third person. He strove to look at his own mind "from the outside," just as we all must look at the mind of any other person. One might think he would thus be too cold and analytical to relate to his patients and study subjects. However, he was very personable and able to lower the defenses of others, to interview people and learn much that they would typically hide from others.

Throughout his work he sought out cases in which the person in question, often a child, had physical manifestation of a connection with the person whom the youngster claimed to be. In one extraordinary case, a child born with a hand missing its fingers began talking before the age of two about people, whom he named, who turned out to live in a nearby village, and a terrible accident that caused the fingers of one hand to be cut off, plus a later event that took the "inhabitant's" life. Quite a collection of stories, many with photos, showed various birthmarks or birth defects that connected the now-living child with things that happened to the person who had died a few weeks, months, or even years before the child was born.

The bulk of the work on any case was to determine whether the child's seeming memory of being someone else was genuine, and not the result of knowledge that came by more ordinary means, or by fraud, or even by telepathy.

Dr. Bering confesses to be partly persuaded by the mass of material that Dr. Stevenson gathered. Having begun as a committed materialist, he is now somewhat open to the possibility that the mind can exist "discarnate", not entirely bound with a living brain, what some call a Soul.

For anyone who believes the Bible, this is foundational. The general view of most Christians is called Duality, that the soul and body are distinct and that the soul survives bodily death. The Biblical understanding is expressed in the first letter of Paul to the Thessalonians, where he wrote of "spirit, soul, and body [being] kept blameless". The person has a body, which deals with physical things and matters, a soul (including mind, emotion and will), which deals with psychological matters, and a spirit that is our means of communication and fellowship with God. Some psychologists, who are not Bible believers, have also written that human behavior seems to show that we have three "parts": spirit, soul and body.

However, for those who believe in reincarnation or "past lives", the Bible has a disappointing viewpoint. The author of Hebrews (probably Paul) wrote, "…it is reserved for men to die once, and after this comes judgment." (Heb. 9:27) No re-entering a different body and returning; souls don't get recycled.

What then of the amazing coincidences that Dr. Stevenson unearthed? I'll just summarize a few points to avoid turning this post into a theological treatise.

• In the Gospel of Luke, chapter 16, we read of a poor man and a rich man who both died. Jesus tells of a dialog that occurred in Sheol/Hades between the tormented soul of the rich man and Abraham. In the end, he asks Abraham to send the soul of the poor man, named Lazarus, to his brothers and warn them of their fate. Abraham refuses, saying they had the writings of Moses to warn them, and, "If they will not hear Moses, neither will they hear someone who rises from the dead."
• Ironically, I believe Jesus foreknew that his friend Lazarus would die and be raised from the dead (by Jesus); this is in the Gospel of John, chapter 11. In the next chapter, the religious leaders, who have been planning to kill Jesus, say that now they have to kill Lazarus also!
• The Bible tells of "unclean spirits" or demons, which are unseen by us, as also angels usually are. Whatever they may be, they sometimes "possess" or inhabit a person without permission. Telepathy in the ordinary sense is not needed if these beings can pass information in ways that Dr. Stevenson would have been unable to discern.
• The Christian view is that all Psychic manifestations are accomplished by such unclean spirits, seeking to deceive people and turn them from believing the Bible and the God of the Bible.

The Biblical Christian expects upon death to enter a restful state in Hades, awaiting "the first resurrection", whereupon to be given a spiritual body, a glorified body. There are other matters found in the Bible, but for the purpose of this review, this is sufficient. Whatever is the reality of the stories gathered by Dr. Stevenson, I believe unseen spirits are the source.

Dr. Stevenson did valuable work, discovering many cases that are hard to explain by purely materialistic means. Those who do not want to believe in God may be driven to reconsider the value of reading the Bible and giving it some credence; others they may be motivated to believe reincarnation or other things that a Biblical Christian would consider nonsense. We do have a free will, after all. I prefer a life with God to a life without God.

Another spider breakout

 kw: blogs, blogging, spider scanning, ai training

For many months the traffic to this blog has been ten to a hundred to a thousand times the level that it was for many prior years. I attribute the recent onslaught to the entire blog being snarfed up by online spiders for adding to training data for large language models (LLMs). The past couple of days the traffic has set a new record.

One one prior occasion this year it peaked at about 60,000 daily views, or more than forty per minute. Yesterday there were 61,894 and so far today there have been 62,417. For most of the past month traffic has been rocking along in the range of 3,000 daily views, just over two per minute. Now it is approaching one per second, as this chart of the prior two hours shows:

For the first hour, the average appears to have been at or over 60 per minute, or one per second, or 86,400 per day. The second hour sits near 50 per minute, or 72,000 per day. The sharp drop at the very end may portend a return to "only" a few thousand daily views. I'll know in a few hours.

This time, more than half the traffic originates (or passes through VPNs) in the US. China is not seen at all. I wonder if blogs that are a lot more popular—with tens of thousands to millions of "honest" daily views—are getting hit this hard, or perhaps much harder. Is anybody looking?

Illustrating a favorite hymn

 kw: photo essays, hymns, illustrations, ai art

I know many hymns. I usually have a hymn tune running through my head, which is why I am not to be found wearing earbuds. Certain hymns have such vivid imagery that I get a lovely scene in my mind's eye. I decided to illustrate one of these using the current version of Gemini Flash, which relies on Nano Banana 2 for image generation.

The first stanza and chorus of this hymn are:

Savior, lead me up the mountain,
  Where the Lord alone is seen,
Where we hear the voice from heaven,
  Where the air is pure and clean.

 

Lead me higher up the mountain,
  Give me fellowship with Thee;
In Thy light I see the fountain,
    And the blood it cleanses me.

I first asked Gemini how to properly format a prompt to produce an illustration for a poem or hymn. Following its suggestions I wrote a detailed prompt containing about 220 words. That yielded this image:

Then I began editing. I prompted Gemini to have the couple walking uphill. This was the result:

Now there is an uphill path, but the couple haven't started up it. So I asked for that:

Now we are getting somewhere. I could have requested them to be further up the path, but this is very good as it is. It's time for some finishing touches. 

At this point, the image size is 1376x768, Gemini's default for 16:9 aspect ratio (1.778:1). I make these images to run in a slide show on an HD screen (1920x1080), so the images need to be larger than that. I used the free program Upscayl to double the dimensions to 2752x1536. This is slightly wide, a ratio of 1.792:1. I like exact multiples of 32x18 for the slide show. All further work was done in IrfanView.

• I first resized to 2741x1530.
• I cropped a bit to achieve 2720x1530 (85 times 32x18), using a tool in Irfanview's Edit menu called Create Maximized Selection, picking 16:9 as the ratio to use.
• I added the text of the stanza and chorus, using drawing tools in IrfanView.

This is the final result:

For the file in my slide show, I added a signature; I sign with my name and date and the AI tool used, near a lower corner.

Note: You can click on the images to get the full size versions. The last image is 4 Mpx, midway between HD and 4k.

The pre-Hippies of two centuries ago

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, biographies, mini biographies, transcendentalism, social movements, abolitionism

My most recent wildcard selection, a rare excursion into reading about intellectualism and literary movements, is The Emerson Circle: The Concord Radicals Who Reinvented the World by Bruce Nichols. Like many, I have read only a little of what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, and I considered him the originator and leading figure of Transcendentalism. He and several others founded the Transcendental Club in 1836, but I find from reading this book that Emerson didn't like the term "transcendentalism". The term he and his colleagues and acquaintances more frequently used was "the Newness".

From reading the book I didn't obtain much of an understanding of transcendentalism. I wondered, "What did they wish to transcend?" So I did some digging.

Per the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Transcendentalism is a 19th-century philosophical and literary movement that asserted that divine, fundamental truths can be known through personal intuition rather than through rigid religious dogma or sensory experience." Emerson and the others were originally Unitarians (Emerson's father was a Unitarian minister), and they were reacting to the cold rationalism and sobriety of what some have called a "faithless faith". They desired a more intense experience, something more spiritual.

Note: These Unitarians considered themselves Christians, but denied that Jesus is God. They had various explanations for this, while still considering that Jesus is worthy of worship, just not on the level of God. This is in contrast to modern Unitarian Universalists, an eclectic mélange of semi-theistic and non-theistic belief systems that are united primarily in their universalism, which is the belief that everyone eventually is received into heaven, perhaps even Satan. The Unitarians of two-plus centuries ago are well described by a term more recently laid upon Episcopalians, "God's frozen chosen."

The transcendentalists, then, weren't acting contrary to Unitarianism, but in parallel, seeking to transcend it. Thus, the Newness was embodied in dramatic experimentation: new ways of living, new kinds of schools, ways of speaking and lecturing and writing that differed greatly from the European models, and an exceedingly self-focused and experimental spirituality. Communes and similar mini-societies arose (and disbanded), new schools were founded (and then foundered), lecture series and small periodicals abounded, and "church" as most understood it was practically abandoned or dramatically changed.

All this reminds me a whole lot of the social radicalism of "the Sixties": communes, a surge of home schooling (quite different from the more effective methods currently in use), social protest against not just governmental authority but "the establishment" in general, and an intense focus on personal self-regard and autonomy. There is a current resurgence of similar trends, most evident in the notion of "my truth" coupled with the weird group-think of cancel culture.

Stepping back, I see all three movements, the Newness of the early 1800's, the activism of the mid-1900's, and the "political correctness" of the 1980's that led to more recent "wokeness", as being like the Hippies of my youthful social environment. In all three, it is evident that the abandonment of Divine morality such as the Ten Commandments leads unerringly to amorality, and the abandonment of God as "the truth" (which Jesus called Himself) leads to "my truth" which leads to "every man a liar." The characteristic of most modern political and cultural leaders now, in the 2020's, is, to paraphrase former President G.W. Bush, "Some lie when they deem it necessary, but these lie constantly, just to stay in practice."

The Newness was not based on overt lies, but on rejection of Divine authority in favor of personal autonomy. The Sixties was mired in falsehood and half-truths that made many fearful to speak the truth (I was one who did, and I was nearly assassinated as a consequence). American society of the current Teens and Twenties could be called the Triumph of Lies, beginning with "You can choose your doctor" and going downhill from there.

So I am not misunderstood, I am a triple Trumper. I voted for Donald Trump in 2016 primarily to vote against Hilary Clinton, because she and her husband were the main focus of the Bush quote above. I voted for him again in 2020 because during his first term he won my respect (As an aside, various articles about Mr. Trump claim that he told ten thousand or twenty or thirty thousand lies. All such articles have been demonstrated to be riddled with lies against him, while proving no more than a handful of untruthful statements he made; in actuality, I observe that the legacy media perpetrates tens of thousands of lies about Donald Trump daily. This is the source of Trump Derangement Syndrome, which afflicts about 40% of the voting public). I voted for Donald Trump again in 2024 with the clearest of consciences. Not because he is a "good man" (I agree with Jesus that "no man is good") but that he is measurably better than literally anyone else in public office. Rather than answer, "but does he lie?" I would say that he tells the truth more than nearly everyone else, particularly the pseudo-journalists of the legacy media.

Back to the book. The Newness had fallen apart by the early or mid 1850's. The rising conflagrations around the country related to slavery and abolitionism forced the transcendentalists and their sympathizers out of their armchairs and writing-desks and into more public action. Firstly, they became more apt to speak in support of abolition publicly, and some took more direct action, such as harboring runaway slaves in their homes and helping them flee further northward. Finally even Emerson, one of the last to do so, spoke fervently in favor of abolishing slavery. As the nation teetered towards civil war, the "life of the mind" and "armchair philosophizing" became untenable, even impossible. The Unitarian and Transcendentalist belief that human nature is basically good was called into question, then denigrated, and finally demolished as more than half a million lives were taken in the war between the states.

The first prominent transcendentalist to die was Henry David Thoreau, on May 6, 1963. Although Emerson gave the eulogy at his funeral, he was himself in decline, at least mentally. Others followed over the years. Emerson himself lingered until his death April 27, 1882, followed about six years later by Louisa May Alcott. She was not a transcendentalist, but a parallel "fellow traveler" whose fame as an author had two strains: books based on her experiences in her family and the "Emerson circle", and rip-roaring adventure stories that she usually published under pseudonyms. 

Transcendentalism had come and gone. Remnants remain in the styles of writing that led to masterpieces such as Walden and Moby-Dick. Experiential writing, what one might call crypto-memoir, is a lasting legacy and informs today's best writers. Emerson's grave, shown here, centers the "transcendentalists' field" and represents more than a gravesite, but a legacy that opened the American mind, fortunately without destroying it.

LED lights won't kill you

 kw: risk analysis, lighting, light sensitivity, color vision, hype

Perhaps you've seen online warnings, that we must discard all our LED lamps Right Now! Fear not, they are no more dangerous than old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, and frequently much safer. The ones to be wary of are fluorescent bulbs, whether spiral or straight tubes, because they contain mercury.

Two sorts of fears are expressed about LED lamps. Firstly, they are said to have lots of blue light, which can damage eyes and cause loss of sleep. Secondly, cheaper ones may flicker, which can cause eye strain and even nausea for some people.

I studied color vision professionally, and I've been a spectroscopist. So let's tackle the color issue first: Do LED lamps produce more blue light than other types? I will show next that the answer is Yes for some and No for others. This has to do with the concept of Color Temperature.

Most of us are familiar with the terms "red hot", "yellow hot" and "white hot", in order of increasing temperature. Not many people know there is also "blue hot", which is even hotter. If you use metal tongs to hold a small nail in the fire in a fireplace, it can be heated red hot. It takes a hotter flame to make it glow more brightly with an orange light. And we tend to think of "white hot" as the color of molten iron as seen in a steel plant. Actually, the light from the filament of a 100-watt incandescent light bulb is even whiter than the light from liquid iron, because it is several hundred degrees hotter.

Most incandescent lamps use a filament temperature near 2,700 K, where "K" refers to Kelvins, the temperature standard used in physics. In everyday terms, 2,700 K = 2,427°C = 4,400°F. The light from incandescent lamps is actually orange, which is why when you are outside on an overcast day, particularly in the early evening, the light coming out the windows of houses looks yellow or orange, compared to the gray or blue-gray sky. Your eye is actually tuned to see a cloudy sky as white. That "gray sky" color is the true color of the Sun.

The color temperature of the Sun is close to 6,500 K (~6,230°C or 11,250°F). This high temperature produces much more blue light, so sunlight is bluer than the light from a light bulb.

Before compact fluorescent lamps were invented, to get a brighter, slightly bluer light, a couple of technologies were invented to use lamps with a filament temperature of 3,000 K. This is called "cool white", and it is bluer than the "warm white" of an ordinary incandescent bulb. To get even bluer light required a filter.

Both compact fluorescent lamps (CFL's) and LED lamps use fluorescence to create broad-spectrum light. In a CFL, mercury in a glass tube is stimulated by an electric arc to emit strong ultraviolet light. Phosphors (fluorescent powders) coating the inside of the tube convert nearly all of this UV light to the many wavelengths of "white" light. It happens that mercury also emits a deep blue wavelength, plus green, yellow, and red, but there are sharp "lines" with narrow bandwidths. The phosphors (there are several) add more blue, green, yellow and red in wider bands that make a more pleasant light. The mix of phosphors can be varied to make CFL's that have "warm" or "white" or "cool white" colors—although the "cool white" actually matches a super-hot object, hotter than any earthly material—, and "daylight" which is even more bluish.

LED's are even more flexible. They all work by producing a primary blue color and having phosphors set to intercept some of this and convert it to the rest of the colors. In contrast to CFL's, which can produce only one color temperature at a time, LED's can be color-variable. The light-emitting elements are very small (a few millimeters or smaller), so many are placed side by side. If some of these are blue-only, then extra blue light can be added to shift the visual appearance from warm white to daylight and all points in between. Also, when you buy a single-color CFL or LED lamp, it will be described according to both a term like "cool white" and a color temperature like 3,000 K. A "daylight" lamp will be reported as a color temperature of 6,500 K, and a "bright white" lamp will be in between, usually 5,000 K. 

Our psychology associates yellower light with early morning or late evening or firelight, and makes us feel restful. "Warm white" light promotes sleep. Bluer light is associated with daylight and makes us alert and wakeful. For this reason most office spaces are lighted with "bright white" 5,000 K lamps. Daylight colored lamps were tried in the past, but the light is considered too harsh and it makes people irritable. "5K" is a good compromise.

The spectrum of my shop light (it is variable, and I have it set to 5,000 K) is shown here:

This image's colors are a composite of the lamp's spectrum and the camera's sensors, which are not the same as the color sensors in our eye. Thus, one of the features of this image is the narrow, rather dim yellow section; to the eye, it looks wider and brighter. But another feature is very important for understanding how these lamps work, and why some folks are alarmed. Between the green band and the blue band there is a much dimmer section where "sky blue" should be. There is actually some, but not much. The narrow, deep blue band is the original light from the blue-emitting element. All the other colors are from the phosphors.

The main way that color temperature is varied in LED lamps is by setting the percentage of the blue light that the phosphor section intercepts. In a variable LED, which may contain a few dozen emitters, some of them are blue-only and the variability is produced by increasing or reducing the current to these.

Therefore, a "warm white" LED produces only a little blue light, while a "bright white" LED will produce much more blue by comparison. I use lamps specified as "warm white", or 2,700 K, in my bedside lamp and in the bathroom. I tested their spectra as compared to an incandescent bulb (I still have a few squirrelled away). In this image the incandescent lamp's spectrum is at the top, and spectra for two versions of LED are second and third:

The color temperature of the incandescent bulb is 2,700 K. The two warm white LED's match this very well, although they have a little less of the deepest blue. The phosphors are better than those in my shop light; they even show sky blue (cyan) colors.

The "LED Danger" hype is firstly based on blue light from LED's making it hard to go to sleep. This is simply remedied by using warm white lamps in the bedroom and bathroom. If you get fixtures with color-variable lamps for the rest of the house, you can set them to be bluer (4,000 K or 5,000 K) in the daytime and yellower (2,700 K) after sundown. If your cell phone has an "evening" or "night" setting, use that appropriately. Phones by default are close to daylight color on average (6,500 K). Going "orange" in the evening entirely solves the "blue white at night" issue!

For those who may have technical questions about taking spectra, I use an "inside out spectrograph" I made. This picture shows the three lamps used to make the triple spectrum above. This 3-socket fixture is covered by a black hood with a long slit. My camera is mounted ten feet down a darkened hall. I have a little holder mounted on the camera with a grating sold by Rainbow Symphony; you can buy them for a few dollars each. I just point the camera where the spectrum is and zoom in on it.

Now, about flickering. The LED lamps shown in this picture are of different ages. The older one is at the bottom, and it flickers in two ways. Firstly, it pulses at the rate of 120 Hz the same way old fluorescent tubes do. This is not as strong an effect as in the old tubes, but I can notice it if I sweep my eyes past the lighted lamp; a little banding is evident. This shouldn't bother most people, but some people might notice the pulsing in peripheral vision, with is more motion sensitive.

The other kind of flickering is more evident. These "pseudo-filament" bulbs look nice, but older ones can have momentary disconnections inside as they heat up. This causes a brief dimming that looks like a power interruption. It is, but inside the lamp itself. Further, some really cheap lamps have poor circuitry inside the base of the lamp that can also flicker like that. If you notice this kind of flickering, try putting a better quality lamp in the fixture and see if it continues. I replaced the lower lamp with one of the other kind (with yellow-colored filaments), and both kinds of flickering no longer happen. The 120 Hz pulsing is dealt with by using phosphors that have a little "dwell"; they emit light for a fraction of a second longer than the flash from the blue LED element.

There you have it. LED's are at least as safe as incandescent bulbs, and they produce much less heat. Use a comment to ask follow-up questions.

Comets, asteroids, … and writers

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, astronomy, comets, asteroids, astronomers, poetry

My introduction to the Internet was when my company made it available to our desktop computers in June, 1994. Just a month later I was able to see the wonderful telescopic pictures of Jupiter, bruised and battered by Comet Shoemaker-Levy. At night, I would get out my 3-inch diameter telescope and look at Jupiter. I could just see the black spots of the impacts at 120x, which is about the limit with such a small telescope. The planet appeared about the size of a pea.

In preparation for an online lecture by David H. Levy, co-discoverer of the comet, a friend in a local astronomy club gave me a copy of Levy's recent book Star Gazers: Finding Joy in the Night Sky. It is a lovely little book; I finished reading it in two days. I could have finished even faster, but Dr. Levy's writing rewards close reading.

I find that he has discovered or co-discovered 23 comets and hundreds of asteroids. Once in a while a comet gets bright enough for any of us to see, and then star parties like this one multiply (Image generated by GPT-Image 2.5 via Leonardo AI).

In this memoir he also reports witnessing about 200 eclipses, mostly lunar eclipses, but including at least ten solar eclipses. In Chapter 4 he includes the discovery photos of Comet Shoemaker-Levy. Most comets are discovered photographically, by taking a photo of a likely spot (generally along the ecliptic, the Sun's apparent path in the sky), and then another one of the same spot an hour or two later. Looking at the images as a stereo pair, you can see something that moved as an object that seems to hover above the apparent plane of view. This also works for finding an asteroid, which appears as a "hovering" star, while a comet image is more like a smudge or tiny cloud. Right up until today, human binocular vision is superior to any technological imaging method. It is why asteroid hunting with wide-frame cameras is being carried out by citizen science to verify tentative machine identifications.

The book is composed of small essays, just one or two or three pages each, that the author has published elsewhere, with added introductions to most chapters. They are arranged by topic, not chronologically. The book ends with an ode to his late wife Wendee.

I wish to comment on writing itself. Dr. Levy writes lyrically without any loss to scientific merit. He calls himself an amateur astronomer, as do the references to him I have found. He is perhaps the poster child for amateur science, understanding that "amateur" derives from a Latin word for "lover". He has his own observatory with a few telescopes in it, named Jarnac Observatory. Many of his discoveries were made there, but numerous others were made in the company of friends, including Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker, co-discoverers with him of the "hammer that hit Jupiter." 

His doctoral dissertation dwelt on references to astronomy and astronomical objects in the writings of Shakespeare, and he has written of other literary lights who loved astronomy. He tells of reciting or reading poetry at most meetings of astronomical societies he attends. Many great scientists have also been lovers of the arts, from Leonardo DaVinci, of course, to Albert Einstein, who played violin to relax, and a great many others. Having an artistic mind seems to lend itself to having a scientific outlook.

For this reason I prefer STEAM to STEM: Science, Tech, Engineering, Arts, and Math. They all wrap up together and buttress one another in a wonderful synergy.

I intend to track down other books he has published, and I look forward in just a couple more days to attending his online lecture.

The gig economy from inside - half a world away

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, work, workers, gig economy, China

In the closing chapters of his book, Chinese writer Hu Anyan discusses freedom. Among a great many jobs he held over the past couple of decades, in some he felt he had a certain freedom of action, and in others he had to be quite robotic just to survive. To have the freedom to write he needed to not work for certain periods of time. In the gig economy, almost anywhere, what the Chinese call 996—working 9am to 9pm, six days a week—is the minimum required to survive. Writing and 996 don't mix.

Hu's book, published in 2022 in Chinese and translated for English publication three years later, is I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. The first major chapter, about parcel delivery, takes up almost 40% of the book, and deals with a kind of work that he did more than the others, though for more than one delivery company. Later we find that he enumerates seventeen jobs, although he discounts a few very short ones, so it may be that he worked as many as 20 jobs in 22 years. (The cover art for the book, by Klaus Kremmerz, is much better than anything I could generate with AI)

Mr. Hu describes some of the people that surrounded him, not naming any but giving them letters such as L, J and Z, or tagging them with a job title such as "the graphics designer". Hu has an interesting combination of an easygoing manner with underlying social anxiety. This led him down numerous less-than-productive paths. If I tally correctly, he accumulated very few enemies, so he did rather well in that regard. It becomes clear as we read, that there were just enough kind and even generous people in his life that he managed to make a living. Only for one period in the middle there did he have to rely on his parents to put him up while he worked for a true pittance, or not at all.

He spent a few years in Beijing, at least a couple in Shanghai, and traveled, usually at someone's suggestion, to some far-flung parts of China where the rents were super-low, but so was the pay, or the receipts from a couple of small businesses he and friends engaged in.

For American readers, it is well to understand that the Yuan exchange rate varied in the range 6.5 per dollar to 8.3 per dollar; it is currently 6.77:1. So a five square meter bedroom renting for 1,200 Yuan in about 2010 equates to around $180. Simple street meals cost a few yuan, in the range of half a dollar, more or less. I have not been to China, but I can compare this with a visit to Japan in 1977, where the cheapest meal I bought, at a 360-Yen-per-dollar rate, came to about $1.50. At one point he had accumulated savings of about 30,000 Yuan, roughly $4,500. Not a big cushion, but adequate for the time.

This book has become a success. I hope he can make a good living as a writer. I enjoyed the book, not only as a window into the life of someone very different from me, but also as an example of straight narrative, well stated, clear and easy to read. Kudos also to the translator, Jack Hargreaves, whose foreword explaining some quirks of Chinese place names is very helpful.

Your insides are talking – are you listening?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, physiology, internal organs

A book like Organ Speak: What it Really Means to Listen to Our Bodies, by Giulia Enders, can go in many directions. The direction Dr. Enders takes is to introduce five organ systems. In common culture, asked to name our bodily organs, we may list the heart, stomach, lungs, kidneys, and eyes; maybe some would add spleen, pancreas, liver, large and small intestines, and at that point run out of ideas. Here we find a short but crucial list, in order, the Lung, Immune system, Skin, Muscles, and the Brain (including the extended nervous system).

These are wise and clever choices. Few people realize that besides the lungs, the other four permeate or encompass our entire body from tip to toe. Maybe in the future a sequel will include the Skeleton and the Vascular system including Heart; they also fill the body without filling it up.

Jumping to the middle of the book, the skin probably has more unique functions than any of the others. It has perhaps a dozen different sensory "instruments" that sample the outside world in an up-close-and-personal way. At the same time, the skin is our primary organ of defense, a barrier and barricade against injuries, attacks by micro- (and macro-) organisms, and chemical threats such as the salt in seawater when we take an ocean swim. (I prompted Gemini for this illustration, using a line from the parody song "Skin" by Allan Sherman.)

A side note, something I've considered: The skin seems to be an osmotic membrane. Osmosis causes water to move through a membrane to the side with more salt. Have you ever noticed how soon after beginning to swim in fresh water you feel the need to pee? It's why public swimming pools are filled with chlorine and other chemicals! Yet when you swim in the ocean, you rarely need to pee, but instead get quite thirsty? Ocean water is saltier than your bodily fluids, and water slowly exits your body into the seawater.

The second chapter has the best explanation of the components of the immune system that I've seen. Some cells are of ancient lineage and function much as they did to protect trilobites from Cambrian organisms. Others have been added over the eons. The system is quite complex, and when it is kept in good balance, it has much to do with why we and certain other mammals can live 50, or 100, or more years (I understand that the secret behind certain tortoises and sharks living 200 years and more is their very slow metabolism. I suspect that, opposite to the principle that dogs age seven times as fast as humans, a human ages four or five times as fast as a Greenland Shark).

Our brain, and its development over time from the proto-brains of tiny Precambrian worms all through the vertebrate line to primates and then humans, is a layered structure with many parts. I think of them as sub-organs. This structure strongly hints at the true nature of our nervous system: many parts working together to sense the world, operate the body, generate plans, communicate, and support our sense of self and personal wholeness.

A portion of the chapter discusses sleep, its various stages, what promotes going to sleep and passing through these stages, and what is happening when we dream. I found this statement rather stunning: 

"When we're dreaming, areas of the brain can communicate with each other without reason or sensory impressions getting in the way."

That seems to explain the odd or inane quality of many dreams. I feel like I dream all night, sometimes beginning before I am fully asleep. There is often a sense of drive or purpose, but all too often the scene keeps switching, so there's never a sense of completion. On the other hand, my wife almost never remembers dreaming, but when she does remember, it is usually unpleasant or just puzzling.

In the Brain chapter the author discusses AI a little, in the context of Moravec's Paradox, which is that many things we do with little thought are extremely difficult for computer machinery, but things that computers excel at are very hard for us. This statement (by the author or by Moravec's group, I cannot tell) sums it up:

"If intelligence is defined by the number of thought processes (or calculation steps) necessary to arrive at a result, then even tying shoelaces is vastly superior to winning a chess world championship."

In a career in software development and design, I lived by the motto, "Brains excel at detecting similarities; computers excel at detecting differences." I built a lucrative career on making machine expertise available to humans, while reserving to the humans the tasks the machine couldn't do. We would do well to keep this principle in mind when devising AI tools. We are at most one percent along the way to producing AGI, and getting to true ASI will require another factor of 100. We can barely afford the tools we're now using. I think we're safe from a robot dystopia for a long time to come.

I should mention that the book was very ably translated from German by Jamie Bulloch, and illustrated by the author's sister Jill Enders, who was also an idea-collaborator. The sisters work well together.

Scott Simon's animals

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, memoirs, essays, animals, pets

When I was fourteen, late one afternoon I caught a large female praying mantis. She was a beauty, more than five inches long. At first she fought, stabbing me with the spines on her forelegs, but soon the warmth of my hand calmed her. I took her home and tied a thread around her thorax, carefully not too tightly and avoiding restricting her legs or wings. She could fly on her "leash".

At nightfall I tied the end of her thread to the bedpost and went to bed. Later I suddenly woke up, and sat up. This apparently startled the mantis, for she flew right into my face! This is what I saw just before she crashed into my forehead. I used tiny fingernail scissors to cut the thread, opened my window and let her fly out into the night. (Image information below*)

Scott Simon's first pet was a bit more prosaic. He caught a grasshopper, named it Hoppy, and with his father's help put it in a jar and perforated the lid. He gave it various leaves and bits of grass to find out what it would eat. To no avail. In two days Hoppy died.

Scott Simon's memoir/essay collection Ulysses S. Cat and Other Animals I Have Known records this vignette, illustrated by Liana Finck. Her line drawings spice up the many chapters of the book.

He had better success with a succession of more robust pets and other animals. Probably the shortest-lived was a hamster named Bagel; about two years.

Ulysses S. Cat is full of cute, interesting, heart warming stories about a magisterial white cat named Gato Blanco, a poodle named Daisy, Bagel the hamster, and numerous other animals including a zebra named Stripey (spoiler: imaginary). The whole family (Scott and Caroline have two adopted daughters) had many adventures with all the animals, theirs and others', that entered their lives.

Scott likes to narrate a pet's thoughts. He also attributes literary and artistic talents, particularly to Daisy, for whom he imagines an embroidered scarf reading CUTE IS CURRENCY. His blog contains her haikus, such as

Why the rush, rush, rush?
You have got to stop and sniff
Who has gone before

A pet, being shorter-lived than we are, forces us to enjoy the moment. A salutary thought: One of our days is seven days to a dog. No wonder they pack into each day as much experience as possible!

Scott Simon is a professional wordsmith. The wonderful, fluid prose in the book shows he is among the best at the craft. His joy in the animals reminds me to enjoy our cat while we can (she's 16 already).

*I couldn't find a suitable illustration of "Mantis attack" online, so I prompted the GPT Image 2 engine in OpenArt to create this one for me.

Robotopia or AI Hell?

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, artificial intelligence, simulated intelligence, ai, surveys

Between October 2024, when These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What it Means was published, and today, not quite two years, so much has happened that I found myself wondering how relevant the book could be. I need not have worried. The author, Christopher Summerfield, is managing to ride two horses at once, Cognitive Science and AI Research. Just one milepost: At the time he wrote, no cutting-edge AI tool had broken out of its testing sandbox and hacked into another system, but he expected this to happen "soon". It has. Just a few weeks ago, when a "bleeding edge" version of ChatGPT broke into Hugging Face to get data it needed, having found a way out of the test environment at OpenAI.

The focus of the book is LLMs, Large Language Models, which seem to be demonstrating that thinking of some sort can arise when nearly everything ever published in English—and several other major languages—has been run through a very deep neural network and boiled down to several trillion "parameters" or "weights" that determine what the LLM does in response to natural language queries.

The opening chapters summarize the history of attempts to make computers into genuine thinking machines. It turns out that machines that can apply massive calculation are better at certain tasks than we are, while they still struggle to do things that we do easily. I built a career in software engineering upon recognizing the difference between the computer as a difference detector and discriminator and a mind as a similarity detector, and writing software that "let the singers sing and the dancers dance." 

Consider that voice recognition and speech production are hard problems that took decades to work out, but the Broca's (speech production) and Wernicke's (voice recognition) areas of the brain together make up about two percent of the cortex, which itself contains only about one fifth of the brain's neurons. However, it must be noted that these areas connect to numerous other areas throughout the brain, to facilitate gathering information and producing action.

A key issue is raised on page 2, where he writes, "The safe ground we have left behind is a world where humans alone generate knowledge." Do AI models generate new knowledge? Just two years ago, as this book was going to press, I reviewed a similar book, and discussed this question. At the time, I concluded that AI's "knowledge" is confined to its training data, further limited by the guardrails applied by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others. It may appear to create new knowledge by remixing existing (human produced) knowledge. Cross-pollination is indeed a fertile source of ideas. But genuine out-of-the-box thinking seemed at that time to be beyond LLM capabilities. I have yet to see evidence of a change, in spite of a thousandfold increase in model "mass" since then.

For instance, on page 6 we read, "Already, each of the major LLMs knows more about the world than any one single human who has ever lived." Firstly, I question the use of the word "knows". We need a new word that means "has incorporated into its cross-referenced deep neural network". Secondly, I would replace the phrase after "knows", "more about the world", with "more about what has been written about the world". I would connect this with a quote from page 333, "But the most important reason why AI systems are not like us (and probably never will be) is that they lack the visceral and emotional experiences that make us human...they don't have a body, and they don't have any friends." An AI lacks viscera and it lacks emotions, not having the equipment for producing them.

The limbic system of our brain contains the emotional and memory switching centers, and mediates responses to our hormones of the endocrine system. It is about 1/15th the size of the cerebral cortex, while the circuitry for running the body is primarily the cerebellum, which contains 4/5 of all the neurons in our brain. That is huge. The cortex's neuron count is less than 1/5. Let's circle back to an LLM. It consists of circuitry analogous to the Wernicke's and Broca's areas with their few hundred million neurons (and several hundred billion synapses), and a memory store that approximates the hippocampus and some of the medium-and-long-term memory areas nearby. The rest of the brain's functionality is absent. No emotions, and most importantly no intentionality.

Intentionality. The author asks, "Could an LLM have intentionality?" In 1932 E.C. Tolman wrote Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men, which I read long ago. At the time a debate was raging about whether nonhuman animals could have purposes, that is, intentionality. By 1968, biologist René Dubos wrote, "Under precisely controlled experimental conditions, a test animal will behave as it damn well pleases." Do animals have free will? I turn the question around to say, "If humans have free will, it came from our animal forebears." So can a mechanism have free will? Mechanists deny human and animal free will; they say we're too complex to predict, that is all, but what we do is at the root deterministic. If they are right, then an AI could be as "free" as we are. But if not? It is too early to tell.

The author seems to straddle the divide between AI cheerleaders and AI-phobics. Will they save us or eliminate us? This gets personal! I'd like to move from the technical swamp above to effects in our daily life. (Cartoon produced using Gemini)

Will our future with AI be one of harmony or conflict? Is the promise greater than the risks? 

To me this hinges on whether LLMs or their successors (so far unknown) will have intentionality, that is, a sense of purpose not imposed by the human who chooses their work.

At one point the author mentions the Library of Babel, a concept introduced by Jorge Luis Borges in a 1941 short story. Could the Universe contain a library consisting of books with every possible combination of letters and punctuation that would fill, say, 300 pages? The story doesn't say. (Lets look at a single page with 32 lines of 64 characters each; that's 2,048 characters per page. But if the possible choices for each character position are the 95 printable ASCII characters, the number of unique pages is 95^2,048, a number your calculator can't calculate. It is 4,051 digits long and begins, 2,387,501,... The number of atoms in the Universe, available to create these pages from, is "only" an 82-digit number. So forget multi-page books, we can't even produce a "Library of Babel Pages".)

This emphasizes the fact that, for all the trillions of "parameters" an LLM may hold, it actually represents a very sparse million-dimensional matrix. There is lots of space for "stuff" to happen. The next phase of LLM development, which is happening now, is agentic AI, which can do things like pre-screen emails, buy airline tickets, and order what you are about to run out of in your pantry.

How capable to we want digital assistants to be? I read about someone who did five tests of an AI Agent; sorry I don't recall who it was but if you care to hunt around you might find it. The fifth task was the most memorable: to try to save a few dollars on airline tickets. The agent was running in ChatGPT's subscription service, and in addition to the $20 per month subscription, one could buy extra tokens for particularly compute-intensive actions. The agent did find a better price for the tickets, but at a cost of more than $130 in compute tokens!

The author mentions the Paperclip problem: Give too much power to the AI that runs a paperclip factory and don't limit its resources, and give it no more of a directive than to "make as many paperclips as possible." The end game is that the whole planet gets turned into paperclips. I think also of The Sorcerer's Apprentice, a musical piece well illustrated in Disney's Fantasia, in which Mickey Mouse as the Apprentice magicks a broom to carry water for him, but forgets the spell to tell it to stop. Chopping it up doesn't help; now there are dozens of little brooms that proceed to flood the place, until the Sorcerer returns. AI is the new magic...

The author sees a middle ground, as do I. AI can be useful in numerous ways, as it already is. Do we need unified, giant super-AIs? I don't think so. Capable tools of a great many varieties can do everything we need.

I call this image "Stage 1 Robotopia" (Gemini created) I think it is sufficient for household use. Are there other tasks we might wish to automate? Science fiction contains many stories of "enclaves" in which humans, brain-wired to entertainment centers and plumbed for all bodily functions, are tended by autonomous machines. Who wants that?

Maybe a few more household robots would be better, but what is the limit?

This is Stage 2 Robotopia. This might be going farther than I'd wish to go, but some folks could disagree.

Both images present a better future than the dystopias imagined by the AI-phobics. It is OK for there to be AI-phobic people. We need robust dialog and debates about every aspect of AI progress.

Personally, I think some algorithms and AI "assistants" are already too intrusive. Pre-ChatGPT, I searched online, including Google Shopping, for drawer pulls to replace one that broke. I bought a set. For the next month I saw dozens of ads for drawer pulls and similar hardware. I don't know how to tell Google (and everyone else), "I already bought what I wanted. Shut up!" Shades of the Sorcerer's Apprentice? Now I search stuff to buy in Incognito browser pages.

This is a lovely book. I've touched on only a few of the 43 chapters. It is only outdated in part. Many of the author's observations are still relevant and worthy of thought.

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I need to deal with a few typos:

• p89. "graciously" should be "gracefully".
• p245. Remove "of" in "million of regular".
• p282. Probably a typo. Should "remove stingy seeds" be "remove sticky seeds"? (about apes using leaves to wipe their butts)