I had never seen or heard of cypress knees before last year, when I visited Spring Grove Cemetery in Cincinnati. It’s a beautiful place to walk around. The landscape is idyllic. Grass, grass, trees, trees, pond, swans, mausoleum, leaves, tombstone, tre—what the hell are those?
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This post ran in 2017 and the last time I looked, the Four Corners is still a Roadrunner cartoon landscape. Here, I explain, at least in part, why.
Flying through Monument Valley on the Arizona/Utah border recently, I was crammed into an old and slow Cessna 147 taildragger. Light filtered through the smoke of distant wildfires. It felt like looking through antique glass at a country of stone giants. We’d arrived at the last blink of this particular landscape, buttes shipwrecked alone in the desert, thin memories of mesas and canyons blown out by erosion.
When I posted the above photo on social media, one of the LWON writers commented that the landmarks look like volcanic necks, which are the hardened insides of volcanoes left when the rest of the land has eroded away. When I said no, this is straight sandstone erosion and not a cluster of exposed volcanic guts, she said prove it. Continue reading
It’s an interesting time to go back and look at the old artificial intelligence work. This summer I’ve been reading Marvin Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1985), the kind of systematic monograph people don’t seem to publish anymore. The computer-like schemas Minsky draws out for how the mind must work belong to cognitive psychology, a school of thought that was sidelined with the rise of neuroscience. It breaks down the work of the mind into basic functions—until they are so basic that none of them, alone, constitutes thinking.
At MIT’s AI lab in the 1960s, Minsky’s team created a robot hand married to a camera and computer. They worked out some of the first solutions to make robots responsive to their changing environments, enough to build a tower out of blocks. These same challenges come up to this day, most recently for Amazon’s picking and packing robots. In Ocado’s 3D printed grocery-packing robots, the capabilities include picking up each piece of produce in just the right way using reinforcement learning.
But it’s the descriptions of generative AI that make the book so striking for this reader at the dawn of Chat GPT. He calls it the “puzzle principle”: “We can program a computer to solve any problem by trial and error, without knowing how to solve it in advance, provided only that we have a way to recognize when the problem is solved,” he writes.
If your task is to create a bridge, say, you can have two programs. One generates every possible arrangement of boards and nails, and the second one determines whether the resulting structure spans the stream. What’s interesting here is that Minsky feels he is describing something ridiculously infeasible. “In practice, it can take too long for even the most powerful computer to test enough possible solutions,” he says. But of course, “the most powerful computer” today is an entirely different beast, and the systems he painstakingly set down are now having their moment of feasibility.
How easy might it have been for him to focus on the impracticality—from the vantage point of a world of Amiga and Atari computers—and dismiss his hypothetical solutions before they even reached the page. Thank goodness he didn’t.
This brought to mind Herodotus, the first historian, who made a similarly courageous decision to disclose the improbable, at the risk of ridicule. Unlike Homer, who set his stories 400 years earlier than the time of writing, Herodotus limited himself to recording the accounts of ‘sons of sons’, so that his histories would describe events within living memory. Even so, some of his research uncovered oral narratives he considered outlandish.
Still, he wrote them down. Take with a grain of salt the claim of the Phoenicians that they sailed all the way around Africa, he scoffs. Those bullshitters say they sailed so far that the sun started falling on the opposite side of their boats! As skeptical as he was, Herodotus took down every word and ultimately let the future judge for itself.
Of course, we now know that this fantastical detail, the heavenly bodies rearranging themselves, is proof that it really happened. The Phoenicians must have crossed the equator, of which Herodotus knew nothing.
We all do our work with little understanding of the future world that may ultimately consume it. That’s why it’s important to still our inner editor when she objects on the grounds of feasibility. When Kepler wrote to Galileo about their respective astronomy projects, he showed extraordinary imagination, envisioning a world in which the infeasible would inevitably become feasible. “Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes,” he writes in the year 1610. “In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky travelers, maps of the celestial bodies. I shall do it for the moon, and you, Galileo, for Jupiter.”
Image: Phoenician ship Carved on the face of a sarcophagus. 2nd century AD. Author: NMB (CC license)
So I finally read Craig’s book Stone Desert, and I’m glad I did. It’s a republication of an earlier essay collection alongside his original journals – sketches, scribbles and notes he made in his twenties while hiking and paddling through desert canyons in Utah, along the Green and Colorado rivers.
For me, the book was a reminder of how zesty life can be when I remember to shut down my computer and leave the damn house without my phone, and with a notebook and pen. Sometimes (especially in summer) I forget what it’s like to be hungry for knowlege — to gnaw on a question before I Google it, letting my own thoughts develop and whetting my appetite before lunging for the answer.
Craig says he finds his 20-something self embarrassing, but his voracious curiosity was a perfect antidote to the summer ennui I’ve been flirting with lately. For one thing, he reminds me that it is in fact possible to write when it’s hot out, and for that I (grudgingly) thank him.
The book also reminds me what human writers can do that AI can’t — move our uniquely gifted, limited, vulnerable bodies through the world, use language to make sense of what we find out there and share it with each other. It’s hard to imagine an AI stashing canoes in the desert and writing about it (though I’d definitely read a sci-fi novel about that). But even if it could, it wouldn’t walk, paddle, or wonder like Craig.
Here’s our conversation:
Craig, Stone Desert is full of references to canoes you’ve stashed in remote river canyons. When and why did you start stashing canoes? Was this something you did as a kid?
I was doing that as a kid with my mom, she and I would do these things. The plans were not quite as elaborate, but there was always some kind of adventure where she’d come up with a crazy plan and we’d go do it, you know, something in the backcountry. I enjoyed that so much that I stepped it up to a new level.
Two of the people that I traveled with quite a bit were running a river outfit out of Moab. So they would jet boat down the Colorado River to the confluence with the Green River and pick people up. We knew these routes and we said, why don’t we just start dropping canoes at the bottom of the route – go hide them up in the boulders and then pick them up again, in the spring. We’ll hike down through a crack in a cliff and when we get to the river, there will be a canoe waiting for us. And in that way, we can kind of sew the whole landscape together.
Confluence of the Green and Colorado Rivers, Google Earth
So wait – you drive out into the desert, and then hike down the canyon and then get in the canoe?
That’s one way to go. We’d get dropped off somewhere and just start these walks. Within a couple of years we were doing 30-day trips out there. We’d have food stashed at the canoes. For the next month, we’d be gone and we wouldn’t see anybody, wouldn’t cross a trail, wouldn’t see another human footprint for 30 days.
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The wild boars of Berlin get a bad rap. Last week one of these beasts was mistaken for a lioness, triggering emergency alerts and a two-day armed search. During the pandemic, another boar stole the laptop bag of a nude sunbather, forcing an absurdly ridiculous birthday suit chase. When I lived in Berlin, I was once stuck in traffic because an entire boar family had decided to relax in the middle of a busy intersection. Some boars steal groceries left unattended in open car trunks or birthday cake at garden parties.
I’d argue Berlin’s abundant boars are actually an untapped resource: A few years ago, I used them as part of a gonzo science project. My friends called it a midlife crisis, but I called it the Boar Witch Project.
I probably need to start from the beginning. For a time, my obsession was the world of online human pheromone peddlers. These are typically men on the straight bro-incel spectrum who promise in creepy videos that a spritz or two of their wares will instantly attract any woman, and lead to a “homerun.”
Like much related to romance, the question of whether human sex pheromones exist is… complicated. Researchers have found enticing clues that human body odors may play a role in seduction, but a scientifically-validated product remains elusive. This hasn’t stopped online entrepreneurs from jumping the gun: There’s a bounty of pheromone colognes for purchase online with perilously evocative names like Sacred Cherry, Raw Chemistry, and Dragon’s Blood.
Some cologne entrepreneurs deploy pseudoscientific claims about their wares, namely that the ingredients androstenone and androstenol are human pheromones. This is nonsense (and for a full explanation of why, read this). But amusingly these molecules do help catalyze sex for wild boars and pigs.
Male swine produce androstenone and androstenol in their saliva. When a horny male pig or boar breathes heavily on a female in heat, she will smell the molecules, spin around, and then lift her rump in an ostentatious demonstration that she is ready to start a family. The chemicals are so successful for getting female pigs in the mood – or at least in the right position – that pig farmers use them to ease artificial insemination. The spray is aptly named Boar Mate.
The human dating scene is already dystopian. It’s just as well that scientists haven’t identified a human sex pheromone with instantaneous results on par with boars.
But what would happen, I wondered, if some Berlin dude had gotten duped into wearing pheromone cologne? Would one of the abundant, local female wild boars heed his siren call? This called for An Experiment.
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My neighbor and I went to see Barbie this past weekend. I loved it. Without saying too much, I loved the colors and the cleverness and the way that the characters said things that I have thought but haven’t said, and things that I’ve felt but that have never risen up and assembled into consciousness.
I did feel a little bad for Ken, though.
Ken. In the movie, his job is “beach.” Not anything specific at the beach. Just beach. In the real world, he isn’t qualified to be a lifeguard. He can’t go out into the water, he can’t even help people on land. In Barbie Land, he collides with an immovable wave when he tries to surf.
He does get a resolution of sorts in the movie, but I had trouble seeing where he was headed, how he was going to take all he learned and move forward. (Sometimes I have a little trouble returning to reality after watching or reading something.) It bothered me like a tiny stone in my shoe, moving around but never disappearing.
I was still thinking about Ken the next morning, when one of my kids agreed to go on a walk with me. We walked down to the beach, which was covered in kelp and patches of small rocks.
This is a kid who is crow-like, a collector of anything shiny. We stopped to pick up sea glass, we found rocks to skip. We saw sand dollars and ropy clumps of kelp. We wondered how a country could really become a country. How many people would have to agree? How big would it have to be?
We watched two dogs wrestling each other, identical except for the color of their eyes. We walked past a man yelling at harbor patrol, stomping his feet, shouting at the sky. We talked about what preys on the spiny lobster.
I stopped thinking about much for a long time as I kept my eyes on the sand. Green sea glass was the same color as torn kelp blades, white sea glass looked like shells. Clear plastic that I wanted to pick up looked like dried-out Velella, which I didn’t.
And then after we’d turned back—we covered a mile in about an hour—it came to me. Isn’t this beach? It’s doing nothing, but also doing everything. Looking, seeing, seeking, finding, wondering. I wasn’t so worried about Ken anymore.
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First photo by Flickr user NoIdentity under Creative Commons license
A well-known fact about beaver lodges, one that any close observer has surely noticed, is that they’re often home to muskrats. I’ve seen this many times, never more than last week up Clear Creek here in central Colorado, where three or four busy muskrats seemed to constantly be motoring to and from a lodge, gathering their bundles of grass with the utmost purpose and industry, their little tails churning the surface like propellors. (By the way, note to everyone who emails me to report alleged beaver kit sightings: If you can see tail movement, you’re watching a muskrat. Beavers swim with their hind feet.)
This frequent cohabitation leaves me with two questions. First, why do the beavers tolerate these semiaquatic freeloaders? Maybe the relationship is simply one of commensalism, whereby the muskrats benefit (in the form of a home, obviously) and the beavers are unaffected. (It’s not like a muskrat takes up much space.) Or perhaps there’s some mutualism at play. A couple days of camera-trapping and direct observation at Clear Creek revealed that the muskrats emerged fairly early each evening, well before dark, whereas the beavers didn’t become truly active until night had nearly fallen. Are the muskrats somehow acting as sentries or scouts, confirming the coast is clear for their more cautious rodent roommates?
Second question: where do they all sleep? Do the muskrats excavate their own miniature chambers? I’d prefer to imagine the two colonies, beavers and muskrats both, nuzzled together in a single capacious cavity, a big furry pile of hot soft bodies snuggling and snoring through the chill Rocky Mountain winters. You’re welcome for that adorable image.
Anyway, lest you think I only detected muskrats, here’s a spot of late-night maintenance performed by one of the lodge’s true architects, benevolently building for the benefit of other species, as per usual.
