Every morning, I wake up, make myself a cup of coffee, and open the Spelling Bee. For the uninitiated, Spelling Bee is a word game published daily by the New York Times, and the concept is delightfully simple: you are given seven letters arranged in the shape of a honeycomb, and you try to find as many words as you can by combining the letters in any order. Words must be longer than four letters, and they must contain the letter in the middle of the honeycomb. The longer the word, the more points you get, and every day, there’s at least one “pangram,” which uses all seven letters.
Chris Pincher. You may think of him as the man whose singular commitment to nominative determinism provided the final straw that brought down the UK Prime Minister. I think of him as my flimsy excuse to republish my paean to nominative determinism!
I’ve also taken the opportunity to top it up with some of the best tips you guys sent after the original post. Please keep sending.
Today’s runner-up is Mr. Rich Nephew, the new anti-corruption czar at the Biden administration. ER doctor Hans Hurt follows in the footsteps of the many nominative determinism acolytes in medicine. We also have Julian Crimes, recently dismissed from the Cambridgeshire Police Department – I like to think it was for rejecting his nominative predestination. Nominative determinisms in history edition: Sidney Vines, botanist.
And finally, a big shout out to Hans Clevers, a pioneering organoid researcher whose foundational work is enabling other researchers to grow their own (mini)brains in their own Petri dishes.
But what if you reject the premise of your name? Read on.
If you’re not careful, you can spend hours looking at moving pictures and not reading things on your magical device. You start on a favorite news site, clicking through the headlines. Maybe you even open a story or two and read a couple of paragraphs. Then you leave those open tabs to visit a social media site, which sends you on another long string of click and skim. And these on-screen attractions are merely a distraction from your work and there are also the chores of daily life, and before you know it, the day is done and the chairs have sat empty once again.
If ever there’s a season to occupy those lonely chairs, this is it, and here at our farm, my husband and I (and our near-constant stream of summer visitors) are doing our part. Compared to all the shiny things beckoning from our screens, sitting on our front porch and watching the sun move across the sky might seem a little boring. Sure, we’ve got spectacular views of jagged mountains and deep canyons. But sunsets unfold slowly, and sitting still and paying attention requires a kind of patience that’s rarely called upon in the digital age. Which is why it feels so important to practice the art of just being — savoring the moment, for its ephemeral quality.
A few weeks ago, I went mountain biking with a friend along a high ridge near Aspen. Near the end of the ride, just before we dropped back down into the valley, we paused to take in the view. My friend pointed to some massive houses perched along the hillside below us. “I did landscaping work at some of those mansions one summer,” he told me.
My mom used to work for the Environmental Protection Agency. She rode the bus downtown every workday from where she lived in the mountains outside of Denver. A golden-hearted woman, she believes in the EPA’s mission, which is protection. She saw her agency’s job as preventing the water we drink and the air we breathe from becoming unhealthy, which would degrade the existence of every living thing, including us. Those are my words. She’d say it was keeping our lives and the world good.
This was years ago and I was in my late twenties, she in her forties. I ran a fly by night river outfit in the desert of southeast Utah and sometimes she’d come on trips. We were with a group of mostly geologists for a week on the Green River and I had this hydrology trick I wanted to show them. It’s where you fill a five-gallon bucket with river water, carry it up a cut bank of a beach, and pour it into the damp sand where you watch a stream run back to the river. It carves a channel, setting up meanders, building cliffs on one side, tearing them down on the other, all six or seven inches deep. It’s a perfect miniature, an analog landscape. The damage left behind would be a winding rivulet that hardly anyone would notice. Like my mom, I prefer to impact my environment as little as possible, while I do like engaging with it.
We tied off in the mouth of a side canyon boxed in with cliffs and a steep beach out front, a good place for this hydrology experiment. When we got out and stretched our legs, we found that the river had pushed up sand and dammed the mouth of this incoming drainage. A body of water had gathered behind it, a long, narrow pond of driftwood and drowned willows.
Two days after the summer solstice, more than an hour after sunset, the sky a rich dark blue that is at last starting to deepen to black. Five of us are arrayed about a grassy swale near the top of the southeastern face of Protection Island. We have all our layers on and hunker down to keep out of the stiff wind that blows off the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We are waiting for the rhinoceros auklets to come back.
On a steep slope a short distance away, we have set small purse nets across the entrances of ten burrows, each of which has a chick deep inside. Our plan—more of a hope, really—is that when the chicks’ parents return in an hour or so, bearing meals of small fish, they will entangle themselves in the nets. We will then fetch them and tape small GPS tags to their backs. Those tags will show us where the auklets go to find food in the Salish Sea, sketching lines across the marine spaces as the birds transit hither and yon.
No one has really looked in a concerted way at where the auklets from Protection Island forage. But this seemingly straightforward question—how do rhinoceros auklets at their largest colony in the Pacific Northwest find enough to eat?—quickly splinters into twenty. As the auklets fly out thirty or so miles each day, do they consistently search in more or less one direction, visiting one general area throughout the breeding season? Or do they range widely? Do they go to the same places year after year? What is it that defines their preferred foraging habitats? Banks? Submarine canyons? Other features? Do auklets avoid areas with high ship traffic? Do males and females forage together or apart? And so on and on and on.
Last month I wrote about delight—specifically, my inability to access it, at least the way I once did. How impossible it felt to notice the little blessings of an ordinary day.
Then a funny thing happened. Mere minutes after writing that post, I started seeing those little blessings. So I opened a fresh list of delights. I kept it going.
I got sick, and partially recovered, and then got sick again, and stayed sick. Still the delights have not ceased.
It’s no great mystery, really: in writing that post, I gave myself permission to grieve. I let the dam crumble, let the flood of sorrow and anger wash through me, and in so doing loosened the talons of despair. Not entirely. Just a little bit. Enough.
I am still sick, still angry, still grieving, still watching the losses accumulate. But the blessings are still piling up, too.
This post first ran in March 2019. Given the recent though still-dubious claims of sentient AI, it seems like a good time to revisit the brilliant vagaries of AI transcription, which I enjoy lightly (ok sometimes heavily) editing into found poems.
P.S. I’ve somewhat fallen out of love with Otter since writing this piece and welcome recommendations.
Like most journalists, I dread transcribing interviews. I can’t afford to pay other people to do it, so I’ve been experimenting with computer programs that use artificial intelligence to transcribe for me. Last week I tried one of the more advanced transcription programs, Otter, and its performance was nearly flawless.
I felt an odd sense of loss as I watched perfect phrases tumble down my screen at close to the speed of real speech. I wasn’t sad about the hours I’ll save hand-correcting transcripts. Instead, I mourned the bizarre, sometimes profane errors of my older transcription service, Trint.
I am generally more likely to cover the evolution of sponges than a Presidential race or sex scandal. But Trint seems to want me and my interviewees to talk about what everyone else is apparently talking about: politics and sex.
Trint inserts “Trump” and “Melania” into my transcripts seemingly at random, as well as words like “dick.” “There’s a lot of data on this, in terms of being a dick,” read the program’s mis-transcription of one of my recent interviews with a soft-spoken botanist.
I suppose Trint’s proclivities should not surprise me. Like all speech recognition programs, Trint uses statistical algorithms trained on large archives of recorded human speech to predict what is being said. Machine learning technology has a well-documented tendency to reflect the uglier aspects of society, including our racial biases, and Trint, launched in 2016, has been reared on our society’s collective chatter since Trump’s election.
I am tired of spending hours cleaning up my transcripts for the fact-checkers, and eager to find a more accurate program. But I will miss some of Trint’s bizarre word choices and its constant attempts to help me join the crowd. Trint’s errors can also be remarkably creative, like the brilliant AI-generated cookie names published on the blog AI Weirdness: Hand Buttersacks, Apricot Dream Moles, and Walps.
Can artificial intelligence be talented? Does it have anything important to say? I have no idea, but before abandoning Trint I want to celebrate its weirdness with the following poems. I didn’t write these poems, Trint did. It is not my fault that they insult Melania Trump or read like dystopian Radiohead lyrics. I am merely Trint’s transcriptionist. Please share your own AI-generated poems in the comments!
Trint’s mistakes – suggestions? Strokes of genius? – are in bold.
Emily Underbite
Hello, Siberia
It’s Emily Underbite
I’m a relic
I haven’t found a gold star yet
My dream has no leverage
I hurt like imitation
Electoral thinking
What organism has analogous or homologous structures and functions to Melania’s? A slug, a lobster?
People have a lot of trouble with electoral thinking, which is essentially understanding the difference between two sponges.
I mean, what can you expect from a sponge?
The sea of science
I landed in the sea of science
But forgot to control for indifference
I found colonies of people
thinking like the rich
Dr. Dick
Off the record, I should have been a novelist
I should write a book about this
It’s really interesting because he’s a great guy
This field is not nearly as sexist as
These are great guys
I didn’t have beers with them but, they, just, it’s funny
Blindspots
Anyway, we’re getting off topic
Talk about that another time
He’s the one who will make the final decision
about whether to write a story about Dr. Dick
Self Confidence
We have purified a sense of self-confidence
and put it in a dish
We watch it over time under microscopes
We discover that these cells are society
and that they exist now
to receive Google’s censoring
Evil Species
You’re asking for my opinion?
Correct.
The Master of the Universe is a giant cat playing with a ball of yarn. We are the evil species on the planet and the end of species. We have ascended to the point of occupying every inch on the planet that we can identify and to modify the nature of ourselves. This a very defensible biological argument for the termination of multiplicity.
Drafted
I’m hoping to get drafted today
or over the weekend
Then we’ll go through another round of edits
Olé! Olé!
Image info:
1) Drawing of an early cyborg, Wikipedia
2) Drawing of the Tandonia sowerbyi land slug, Wikipedia
3) Vintage illustration from the Book of Limericks, 1888
4) Kittens and Cats; a Book of Tales, by Eulalie Osgood Grover; 1911; Boston, Houghton Mifflin.
An affirmation for everyone out there who happens to have a uterus: WE BELONG TO OURSELVES. Our bodies are ours, no matter what the law says, even if we have to fight like hell for our inherent human rights.
