Time, fugit, etc: It’s been four years since the Bad Spring. Well, almost. I can tell when the troubles really began when I look at the Bleat banners for March and they’re all Andromeda Strain. That was the third week. Like a lot of people, I do not have entirely bad memories of the lockdown, because A) I did not stay home, and B) Natalie came back from college, and we also had Judith, our exchange student from Barcelona. We made bread and pasta and had dinners together, and Birch was happy that someone was home all the time.
FF to the end of this month: Judith is coming back to pay a visit, and I just grabbed some cheap flights to get Natalie back here for the reunion. This all makes me very happy. The big question is whether Birch will remember her, and I suspect he will. Shock at first, as the eyes make a bucket-brigade to the place where Dog Memories are stored, and then perhaps a bark of doubt, then glee.
This would make Judith happy. Natalie drew for her a picture of Birch, and it’s still on her fridge in a country on the other side of the ocean.
Natalie and I have had two long text convos the last few days, about all manner of things, the usual ping-pong and shifting-topic ramble. Starts with a clip to the latest thing she did for her client at the agency, then it’s 20 minutes arguing about AI, then murder documentaries (As I tweeted today, I am watching a new ABC true crime show. First ep: Fargo. Second Ep: North Minneapolis. Third ep: Mall of America. If the pattern holds the 4th will be up the street and the 5th in my house) then Iceland and what we miss about England - and then whatever the Twitter discourse is. I was reading some of it to my wife, and she said “why don’t you just call her and talk?”
Because . . . we’re both writers?
As for the arguing about AI: she hates it more than I do, although I see some uses. I think the text-to-video will be interesting when it gets fast and cheap: imagine recording the stories of an aged relative about bygone times, sending it to the AI, which turns it into a movie. You show it to Grandma, she tells you what’s right and what’s wrong, you fix it up and you have something to pass down.
Or . . . it’s better for subsequent generations to just listen, and imagine. I get that. So maybe it’s just for Grandma?
I’d love to use every resource I can find to reconstruct a movie of downtown Fargo in the 60s. Give the tech a few years, and you can slap on your VisionPro and walk through the scene and interact with people. It’s dYsToPiAN if that’s all you do, but it beats the Fargo Facebook page where people say “who remembers the popcorn stand on Broadway?” And everyone says “yes it was so good and so greasy!”
I know, I know, I know.
Edward G. Robinson looking at the deer and trees before he goes off to the Soylent processing plant. But there has to be a middle ground between heedless ahistorical Disruptors giving us shiny distraction toys because they’re COOL and miserable alienated Black Mirror dystopia.
The Collaborative is mere days away from opening. The door-coverings were askew, so I surreptitiously snapped a shot:
This is intended to get people to come back to the office, because there's a BAR! It's a third-place, even though it's in your second place. I don't think it will make the nasty-cat-blanket set return, because they're not pro-social in a general sense. Besides, this looks like a place where you have to dress up
In related important building news, escalator news! Remember, it's been shut down for repairs since October. I saw one of the workmen laboring on a top step, within earshot. I asked when this would be finished. He said the inspection would be in a week.
"TWO WEEKS" said the other guy at the bottom of the steps.
“Will the escalators be motion-sensor activated?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I was RIGHT.
Of course, this is for the Climate. The escalators will not run all the time at normal speed, but will move slowly at a sluggish, indifferent, sullen pace until someone approaches, and then they spin up, like a sleepy employee who suddenly acts busy when the boss approaches. This saves energy, and thus does its part to cool the planet. Decades from now when the seas recede an inch, they’ll point to things like this.
Sorry, don’t mean to be so predictable. I think it’s fine to do this to save money on electricity - which should be too cheap to meter due to massive efficient nuclear power plants, but that’s another story. I brace for the press release or email from the building touting this interminable refit as a contribution to the great moral campaign of the day, sustainability. Doesn’t mean anything. It’s the margarine of eco-talk, something you can spread over anything.
I’m all for sustainability, and even more, for increasability. I am not content with just sustaining. Power, prosperity, ambition, invention, freedom. MORE.
The other day Twitter had a list of YouTube sites targeted by "The Center for Countering Digital Hate" for Climate Denial. The group insisted that they be demonetized, and that Google change its TOS.
They used AI to figure out who was doing all the denying.
We gathered transcripts for 12,058 videos from climate denial YouTube channels.
Data was drawn from 96 YouTube channels that have promoted denial
Videos under analysis are climate-related and from the last six years
Videos in our dataset containing denial claims were viewed 325 million times
These transcripts were categorized by an existing Al model trained on climate denial.
Testing indicates the model is 78% accurate in categorizing claims in our dataset.
Well, settles that. So why did they do this?
Climate change is a complex, multifaceted problem and scientific consensus is established through disagreement and inquiry. However,
Translation, “never mind about that disagreement and inquiry thing"
. . . this report demonstrates a clear change in the substance of climate denial claims over the last five years, many of which contradict the well-established scientific consensus on climate change.
I grew up believing in “well-established scientific consensus.” My faith in The Science was modified and informed by subsequent events - but always in retrospect, rarely at the time. I was reminded the other day of Nuclear Winter, and when I looked it up on wikipedia, this stood out:
"Nuclear winter", or as it was initially termed, "nuclear twilight", began to be considered as a scientific concept in the 1980s after it became clear that an earlier hypothesis predicting that fireball generated NOx emissions would devastate the ozone layer was losing credibility. It was within this context that the climatic effects of soot from fires became the new focus of the climatic effects of nuclear war.
So there was a scientific consensus that evolved after new data and dissenting opinions were incorporated? Huh.
Anyway, the group that compiled the list of Climate Heretics has demands.
To address this substantive change, Google must update its policy:
Current policy: "We do not allow content that contradicts authoritative scientific consensus on climate change."
Recommended policy: We do not allow content that contradicts the authoritative scientific consensus on the causes, impacts, and solutions to climate change.
The current policy should be the one that worries everyone.
I had no idea that was the Google policy, but it doesn’t surprise me a bit. This is just the sort of thing you get inside the iron bubble: a sentence that sets forth THE LAW without defining “contradicts,” “authoritative,” “scientific,” and “consensus.” Like blasphemy and porn, you’re supposed to know it when you see it.
If I make a video for YouTube that insists the new escalators are not sustainable because they enable people to come to the office when they should be staying home to minimize the carbon impact of commuting, am I speaking in the tongues of sin? Well no that’s ridiculous. And it is, but these days all manner of ridiculous positions are advanced as a marker of piety, or a way to push the conversation to the edge so anyone who suggests less ridiculous positions is seen as moderate and sensible.
Anyway. Point being, the escalators worked fine. One went up, one went down, and you got on them every day not thinking much about sustainability.
They've been working on it for five months. No one can get upstairs directly by our building's door. The workmen show up a couple of times a week to tinker and clank. Maybe when it's all done there will be a new round of certification for the building to boost its green rating, and the owners will trumpet the good news in press releases read by no one, printed by no one, and affecting absolutely no one at all - particularly the people who want to stay home and type.
I suppose it doesn't make sense to run escalators that assume someone will be along any second now. That's so first week of March 2020.
It’s 1965.
Oh for the days when a bank robbery was a front page story. Don’t know if they ever got them.
Huh? Oh, those Muslims. I guess they lumped them all together then.
The editorial page was concerned with Vit-nom.
Scott Long was not the subtlest of cartoonists, some times. But he was absolutely dependable and turned 'em out every day, as they did in those times, and - well, he was absolutely dependable. Everyone checked them out.
And fat-fargin’-lot-of-good it’ll do him, even if you believe it.
No, not Phil. Phil, the Playboy cartoonist, was his brother.
Frank Interlandi (1924 – February 4, 2010) was an editorial cartoonist for the Des Moines Register and the Los Angeles Times. While at the Register, he won the prize for best editorial cartoon given in 1961 by Sigma Delta Chi, the professional journalism society. A year later, he joined the Times, where he remained until 1981. His stock character in many cartoons was an "angry little old lady in tennis shoes”.
Frank and Phil, brothers, cartoonists. You have to love it:
It never, ever ends
It never, ever ends
It never, ever ends. This time it’s not AI, but automation.
Alice Mary Hilton (June 18, 1919 - August 10, 2011) was a British-American academic and author. She coined the term cyberculture in 1963. She served as president of The Institute for Cybercultural Research, which she founded, and of the Society for Social Responsibility in Science.
At first Hilton was optimistic that new technologies could help to eliminate poverty and cheap labour focused on repetitive tasks, but she became more wary of technology and increasingly pessimistic in the late 1960s as a result of the Vietnam War growing social unrest of that period.
In subsequent decades, she turned her attention to the mathematical history of architecture, with a focus on medieval cathedrals.
A not-unexpected trajectory.
That'll do! See you hither / yon. More cellophane ads await. So many cellophane ads.
