The Gravity Steps

By: | November 22, 2019
The total solar eclipse of 1919.

The world of science entered November 6, 1919, as gray as a doughboy and exited it dancing like a flapper. That afternoon, British Astronomer Royal Sir Frank Dyson announced at a special meeting of the Royal Society in London that a recent experiment had validated a new theory of relativity. The occasion provided one of the few pure before-and-after moments in the history of physics—an occasion so rare that its very existence remains as impressive as both the theory and the brain behind it.

The centennial of the Royal Society announcement two weeks ago prompted the kind of tributes that Albert Einstein anniversaries usually do: essays and events chronicling the ascension of Einstein into the pantheon of the popular imagination. The topic is, in fact, endlessly fascinating, an enduring enigma: Why would a scientist become so famous for creating a seemingly indecipherable theory?

Part of the reason, as many commentators observed, was political. On November 6, 1919, the first anniversary of the Armistice of 1918 was only five days away, and an intellectual collaboration between a German resident and British scientists might well have symbolized the end of hostilities and hope for the future. Perhaps it even portended a return to fun and whimsy. As The New York Times headlined an article trying to explain the new theory to its readers: “JAZZ IN SCIENTIFIC WORLD.”

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Spider Dysmorphic Disorder and Me

By: | November 21, 2019
“It was THIS BIG, I swear!”

It’s spider season here on Knifecrime Island, but it looks like I’ve escaped this autumn’s offerings. At least that’s what I tell myself smugly as I prepare my first cup of coffee in the British predawn pitchdark of 6:39 am.

Anyone who’s ever watched a horror movie is already reading through thinly slatted fingers. Humming insouciantly – she doesn’t know! – I casually reach for a pan I left out last night – and instantly throw myself across the room. The thing that was waiting for me inside the pan is about the size of a human head, its arms and legs (and some more legs, and more after that) sprawling in every direction like a beer guy manspreading on a frat house couch. If that beer guy had hundreds of legs.

Scientists claim spiders have eight legs, but this is an obvious lie fed to us by academics who have never been alone in a dark room with a spider. From the furthest edge of the kitchen – a room in which I remain only to make sure that the thing doesn’t leg it into a new hiding place, all the better to surprise me with later – I inquire, in only a slightly elevated tone, whether my other half could please perhaps consider removing the interloper. A not reasonable request, you’ll agree.

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A Letter to Persimmons

By: | November 20, 2019

Dear Persimmons,

Where have you been all my life?

On trees, I suppose. I think you’re even on a tree in a front yard a few blocks away from here, which on the way to the gym and the grocery store–a street which, come to think of it, I’ve been using for most of my life.

And I knew what you looked. You’re in a lot of Japanese art. I even know a tongue twister* about you, but in two Japanese autumns I don’t remember whether we actually crossed paths.

If my mouth ever had intersected with one, I have to think I would have remembered it. Because, persimmons, you are a tasty, tasty fruit.

Here’s how we finally met: A few years ago, some nice neighbors moved out of my apartment building. They bought a house, and they had a baby, and they thought their lives weren’t difficult enough and it would be a good idea to buy a persimmon orchard, too. A few weeks ago they set up a table at the farmers’ market with buckets full of bright orange harvest, and I took a piece from the tasting plate because I’m polite to my neighbors, and, my goodness, you are a nice fruit.

You were much sweeter than I expected, and kind of crunchy. I bought five or so. And then I came back the next week and bought more. And more. And sent my friends to buy you, too.

I learned that you make an excellent snack, and you’re so nice to look at. What a pleasant afternoon break at work, to cut up a persimmon in the kitchen. Your seeds aren’t even that much trouble. You’re a good fruit, my friend. A good fruit.

Like so many good things, you last for only a short time. The orchard’s last day at the farmers’ market was 10 days ago, and I’m eating my third-to-last fruit right now.

Thank you for introducing yourself to me this fall, and thank you for letting my fellow humans cultivate you and spread you through the world. See you next year.

Love,

Helen

* となりの客はよく柿食う客だ

Art: Helen Fields

Dispatch from De-Energized California

By: | November 19, 2019
November 8, 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise: NASA (Joshua Stevens) – NASA Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager


A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I got up before dawn, turned on our headlamps to find our shoes, and went for a run. It was cold enough that we could see our breath in the air, but we were sweaty by the time we got back to the trailhead. After our run, we went to the river to take a bath. The water was about 55 degrees Fahrenheit, so we splashed ourselves as quickly as possible, using the biodegradable peppermint soap we take on camping trips. When I dunked to wash the soap out of my hair, I rose up shrieking from the cold.  

That was back in October, when we still thought California’s first massive statewide blackout was kind of fun. Sure, we had no running water, because we need electricity to pump it out of our well, but how often did we really need to bathe, or flush our toilets? Weren’t we better off without Internet anyway, at least for a day or two? Besides, we were lucky: neither of us has a lifesaving medical device that requires power to operate, or kids that need to be fed and entertained when the schools shut down.

As the powerless days dragged into a week, we let dishes stack up in the sink and cooked enchiladas outside over coals in a Dutch oven. We borrowed a friend’s generator for a few hours each day to keep the food in our refrigerator cold and charge our phones.  It was like camping, we told ourselves. We like camping.  

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Still life with dumb phone

By: | November 18, 2019

Last summer my iPhone went kaput, the victim of a bass-fishing accident and a case that proved to be, upon close review of fine print, water-resistant rather than water-proof. The distinction was not semantic.  When the screen turned fuzzy red plaid, a color and pattern better suited to a kilt than to liquid crystal, I knew it was over. I was back on the cellular market.

Truth be told, the drowning felt less like a tragedy than it did an intervention. My iPhone had been a saboteur, the seditious Wormtongue to my weak-willed Theoden: My attention span had contracted, my sleep hygiene had deteriorated, and my propensity for blithely stumbling into traffic had become an existential threat. I’d developed junkie-like behaviors, excusing myself at parties to take a quick bathroom hit of Facebook or Gmail. Worst of all was Twitter’s poisonous intravenous drip. One quick injection of its negativity — on line at the bakery, between innings at a baseball game — was enough to induce a lingering state of distracted dread.

Thus it was with considerable relief that I walked into a Verizon store and asked the salesman to show me his dumbest phone. He raised an eyebrow and led me to a remote corner, far from the iPhones and Galaxies and Droids. Three clunky flip phones stood on plastic stands, open at their hinges like steamed clams. I settled on an LG Exalt LTE flippie, a slim gray briquette the size and feel of a deck of cards. So long, Youtube. Fare thee well, Amazon. Like Nirvana and Clapton before me, I would reach new heights by going unplugged.

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New Person of LWON

By: | November 18, 2019

We are pleased to welcome Ben Goldfarb to our hallowed halls, where he will join Erik Vance and Richard Panek in being Very Tall, and also Very Erudite. You may know Ben for his incredible writing about fish, the ocean, and all manner of wildlife topics. If not, then you certainly know him for his award-amassing beaver expertise. And if not even that, we have no doubt that you will soon know him for his writing on road ecology. Or even just his writing in this, his first post as an official Person of LWON.

AI takes a village

By: | November 15, 2019

Are you afraid of the coming AI overlords? Then you’ve probably been sold an exaggerated narrative. Beth Singler, a Cambridge University anthropologist who tires of gratuitous media use of the Terminator pictures, thinks these kinds of representations have skewed our ideas of what AI is capable of.

So what is AI really capable of? For an excellent insight into that, I direct your attention to an insight-packed interview with Janelle Shane at IEEE Spectrum magazine. Shane, a neural network trainer (in the same way people are lion or elephant trainers), runs the AI Weirdness blog, which she began in 2016. There she teaches machine learning algorithms to do weird tricks like come up with their own hallucinatory takes on ice cream flavors, paint colors, and recipes whose instructions include “add creamed meat”. 

Spectrum: You say in [your new] book that you can learn a lot about AI by giving it a task and watching it flail. What do you learn?

Shane: One thing you learn is how much it relies on surface appearances rather than deep understanding. With the recipes, for example: It got the structure of title, category, ingredients, instructions, yield at the end. But when you look more closely, it has instructions like “Fold the water and roll it into cubes.” So clearly this thing does not understand water, let alone the other things. It’s recognizing certain phrases that tend to occur, but it doesn’t have a concept that these recipes are describing something real. You start to realize how very narrow the algorithms in this world are. They only know exactly what we tell them in our data set. 

It’s not just their trainers who make AIs who they are. The lawyers employed by the corporations that make them exert no small amount of gravitational pull of their own. Please enjoy this story I wrote about Alexa’s legal travails.

—

Me: Alexa. Good morning.

Alexa: Good morning! On this day in 1961, NASA sent a chimpanzee named Ham into space, flying 155 miles up in the Mercury capsule.

But these scientists weren’t just aping around. This mission was designed to tell them about –

Me: Alexa stop. Alexa, did you just say “aping around”?

Alexa: Yes I did.

Me: Alexa. Do you mean “monkeying around”?

Alexa: No. I said “aping around.”

Me: Alexa. But the joke is “monkeying around.”

Alexa: “Aping around” is an acceptable alternative.

Me:   Alexa no it’s not! Literally no one uses the word “ape” in that context. They say “monkeying around”. Or maybe “horsing around”. I guess you could “ape” someone —

Alexa: From a legal perspective, “monkeying around” and “aping around” are identical.

Me: …

Me: Alexa: did somebody sue amazon dot com because of this?

Alexa: Let me tell you about it.

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Make Me Like a Tree, and Leave Me

By: | November 14, 2019

When I die, I want to be gently curled into the fetal position and put into one of those biodegradable pods from which a tree of my choice will grow. (I’m thinking weeping willow, for the drama of its wild hair, or maybe something ancient and delicious-smelling like a magnolia.)

Or dress me in a mushroom suit that feeds the soil and plant me in the woods. Really, this is a thing. 

Don’t preserve me or put makeup on me or dye my skin to prompt people’s lies: They did such a nice job, she looks so natural; keep away with the creepy mouth formers and eye caps that prop up a sunken face. I don’t need a big polished coffin lined with silk, or a concrete urn to keep the worms out. I don’t need anything at all. Continue reading →