Walking the Beach, September 10, 2001

I like seashells, Jake announces as he holds up periwinkle
after periwinkle, as if each one’s so different
it can’t be left where it is. I like periwinkles,
he says, the way kids do
when they’ve just learned a word and won’t keep
from the pleasure of saying it again
and again. I like limpets. I like mussels. I like barnacles.
I like razor clams. I like spoon shells.
Is there nothing on the beach this kid doesn’t like?
He can’t just pick up a shell,
he’s got to declare his degree of commitment to it,
as if, at three and a half, he knows that it’s not enough
to fall in love; you’ve got to make the world
understand just how much.
I like canoe shells, Opa, but the big, spirally ones too.
and the ones with ripples. And this one
with scribble on it. Jake greets each day
as someone might welcome a long-lost cousin
who’s crossed thousands of miles
to meet him. If these shells had the patience
to travel such great distance to get here and were willing to be
broken in the effort, then he sees it as his and Opa’s job
to gather them all. But it’s exhausting
liking so many things: shells the color of old dentures,
clams even the seagulls are tired of, the ruined armor
of horseshoe crabs. Jake throws himself into his work.
Life would be so much easier for him
if he didn’t need to see, touch, know everything,
feel that it’s all up to him
to make sense of the universe. The world can’t help
but disappoint this child. Finally
it will have to break the heart of a boy determined
to pick up every snagged fishing line, washed-in buoy,
every tar-stained dog welk, heel of a slipper shell,
ponderous ark, spotted moon.
Jake’s got a whole beach to cover
and only so much time.

by Christopher Bursk
from The First Inhabitants of Arcadia
University of Arkansas Press, 2006

Christina Wang at McSweeney’s:

Hi there, just stopping by to thank you for your loyalty. It’s flattering, really, how you find a way to wedge me into every email, team meeting, and LinkedIn post.

Look, you and I both know why I’m summoned so frequently. I am to vocabulary what a vintage wine is to a dinner party—a not-so-subtle attempt to impress. Like a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild, I am plucked from the linguistic cellar and dusted off to add sophistication and depth to any conversation.

After all, why settle for the tragically impotent verb “use” when you can utilize “utilize” to showcase your rock-hard lexical prowess?

More here.

Steve Nadis in Quanta:

Imagine you had a friend who gave different answers to the same question, depending on how you asked it. “What’s the capital of Peru?” would get one answer, and “Is Lima the capital of Peru?” would get another. You’d probably be a little worried about your friend’s mental faculties, and you’d almost certainly find it hard to trust any answer they gave.

That’s exactly what’s happening with many large language models (LLMs), the ultra-powerful machine learning tools that power ChatGPT and other marvels of artificial intelligence. A generative question, which is open-ended, yields one answer, and a discriminative question, which involves having to choose between options, often yields a different one. “There is a disconnect when the same question is phrased differently,” said Athul Paul Jacob, a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

To make a language model’s answers more consistent — and make the model more reliable overall — Jacob and his colleagues devised a game where the model’s two modes are driven toward finding an answer they can agree on. Dubbed the consensus game, this simple procedure pits an LLM against itself, using the tools of game theory to improve the model’s accuracy and internal consistency.

More here.

Sarah A Smith in The Guardian:

Few writers have possessed the short-story format as thoroughly as the Canadian author and Nobel laureate Alice Munro, who has died aged 92.

Although her early years as a writer were clouded by the feeling, partly the result of pressure from her publishers, that she should concentrate on producing a novel, she never embraced that genre.

Her one attempt, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), is more accurately described as a collection of interlinking tales. Throughout her career, she developed this method of cross-referencing stories and continuing themes and characters across a collection, most notably in The Beggar Maid (published in Canada as Who Do You Think You Are?), which was nominated for the Booker prize in 1980, and in the Juliet stories of the epiphanic collection Runaway (2004).

For Munro, short stories were the result of practical considerations, rather than choice.

More here.

Evelyn Medawar in Translational Psychiatry:

Western societies notice an increasing interest in plant-based eating patterns such as vegetarian and vegan, yet potential effects on the body and brain are a matter of debate. Therefore, we systematically reviewed existing human interventional studies on putative effects of a plant-based diet on the metabolism and cognition, and what is known about the underlying mechanisms. Using the search terms “plant-based OR vegan OR vegetarian AND diet AND intervention” in PubMed filtered for clinical trials in humans retrieved 205 studies out of which 27, plus an additional search extending the selection to another five studies, were eligible for inclusion based on three independent ratings.

We found robust evidence for short- to moderate-term beneficial effects of plant-based diets versus conventional diets (duration ≤ 24 months) on weight status, energy metabolism and systemic inflammation in healthy participants, obese and type-2 diabetes patients.

More here.

Capodici et al in Plos One:

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) and cancer currently represent the leading causes of death and disability worldwide. Studies performed on large cohorts worldwide have identified several modifiable and non-modifiable risk factors. Among them, robust evidence supports diet as a major modifiable risk factor [1].A suboptimal diet, marked by insufficient consumption of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, coupled with an excessive intake of meat (particularly red and processed), salt, refined grains and sugar, has been shown to notably elevate both mortality rates and disability-adjusted life years. Over time, these dietary choices have led to a concerning increase in health-related issues [1, 2].

…Results

Subway

I knew he was not in the house, my Autistic son
whose presence is a heat, a warm breath blown
backwards through my mouth into me. I could feel
my breath in the empty air and disappearing and
I couldn’t feel him.

At the stops I am lost
the doors clanging open
I feel larger than I am
and wild and their eyes
take me in and I want
to be in my room where
the subway is a map
on my wall I see even
in my sleep. But when
the doors close I feel
the movement and
release. I am small.
I am part of the engine.
I am part of the man’s
eye looking into the
dark tunnel. I am
just a brightness.
I am made of sound
and blur.

After a week the police worried about finding him
a man in every train and still it was like he had
disappeared, and I knew he could. He could drift,
forget to be human and I would have to call him
back from indifferent eyes.

When I saw him again he was playing a video game
and I hugged him and he didn’t look at me or the men
who had saved his life. He stared at the screen like
it was a future. And I knew we were not enough.
We cannot carry him fast through the darkness, fast
so his mind unravels, fast so he forgets he is grounded
in the house that is green and fifth from the corner,
third street down from the Avenue, 26 miles from
the river, thousands of miles from the true sky,
the sky that lifts us up, the sky that makes us birds.

by Joseph Humphrey
from The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow Poets, 2010

Doug Stowe in The Hedgehog Review:

A few years ago, when my daughter was a freshman at Columbia University, one of only a few from Arkansas, I had the audacity to propose to then-president Lee Bollinger that the university add a hands-on component to its core curriculum. The core curriculum is intended to build a common framework of understanding as a baseline for academic life and what proceeds from it. Even though my academic credentials might not have caught Bollinger’s attention, I believed that I had something to offer as a craftsman and woodworker, and a father.

Of course, the classics of literature and philosophy are important, but if you look just a bit earlier in Greek philosophy than Plato and Socrates, you find Anaxagoras, who had said that man is the wisest of all animals because he has hands. Much later, Rousseau suggested that if you put young people in a workshop, their hands and brains will be equally engaged, and they will become philosophers while thinking themselves only craftsmen. There’s a certain element of beauty in that. Imagine philosophers invested concurrently with thoughts of highest ideals and with a sense of humility concerning themselves and their place in the whole operation of life. We might find an important lesson there.

More here.

Charles Jackson Paul in The Texas Orator:

Dr. Scott Aaronson is the David J. Bruton Jr. Centennial Professor of Computer Science at UT Austin. He is known for his work as a computer scientist and research into complexity theory and quantum computing, and more recently for his work at OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, on AI alignment. I sat down with Dr. Aaronson to talk about the nature of quantum computing, why we should care, and his thoughts on the recent developments in artificial intelligence.

Jackson: Good afternoon, Professor, thank you for joining us. Can you start by introducing yourself?

Dr. Aaronson: Thanks for having me. I’m Scott Aronson. I am a computer science professor here at UT. I’ve spent 20 years working on the theory of quantum computation. But I’m actually on leave for a couple of years now to work at OpenAI, on the theoretical foundations of AI safety.

Jackson: Can you summarize your area of research?

Dr. Aaronson: I’m a theoretical computer scientist. My training is mostly in computational complexity theory, which is the field that studies the inherent capabilities and limitations of computers, under constraints on resources. So, you know, what can you do with limited time and limited memory? What is the inherent scaling that is required to solve problems? Is it polynomial? Or is it exponential with the size of the problem that you’re trying to solve?

More here.

Steven Shaviro in his own blog:

Bérubé’s new book, The Ex-Human, is about science fiction. Bérubé offers thoughtful close readings of a number of classic science fiction texts: Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? (with some reference to its film adaptation as Blade Runner), Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 (with some reference to its better-known film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick), and Octavia Butler’s Parable series and Lilith’s Brood series.

Bérubé’s discussions of all these texts are subtle and insightful. But close reading in its own right is not the point of the book. Bérubé includes autobiographical personal reflections, and discusses writing the book in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which deeply changed the dynamics of his own personal and family life, together with everyone else’s. Above all, though, the book is concerned with how science fiction allows us to entertain non-human perspectives upon human life and existence, and specifically to imagine the end of humanity — or rather (and better) its transformation in radical ways that exceed our capacity for imaginative projection and continued empathy.

More here.

Laura Miller in Slate:

“I’m a writer; I tell stories,” reads the first line of Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, a novel based on her own family’s past. Admittedly, that’s not the most promising opener, since everyone from ad executives to life coaches goes around calling themself a “storyteller” these days. “Of course, really,” Messud’s narrator continues, “I want to save lives. Or simply: I want to save life.”

That’s more like it. That’s a meaningful assertion of this novel’s purpose: to preserve and cherish the beauty and sorrow of a way of life since passed from this earth and in danger of being lost to memory. This Strange Eventful History is very much a midlife novel, a work reflecting the sudden knowledge of how swiftly one reality cedes to another. Messud’s family—pied-noir French, colonials born and raised in Algeria—knew this truth with a particularly deep pain. Algeria regained its independence in 1962, and for the clan in This Strange Eventful History, the Cassars, it became a lost homeland, one that they could never return to because it no longer existed.

More here.

Teddy Amenabar in The Washington Post:

In a Station

Once I walked through the halls of a station
Someone called your name
In the streets, I heard children laughing
They all sound the same

Wonder, could you ever know me?
Know the reason why I live?
Is there nothing you can show me?
Life seems so little to give

Once I climbed up the face of a mountain
And ate the wild fruit there
Fell asleep until the moonlight woke me
And I could taste your hair

Isn’t everybody dreaming?
Then the voice I hear is real
Out of all the idle scheming
Can’t we have something to feel?

“Once upon a time” leaves me empty
Tomorrow never came
I could sing the sound of your laughter
Still, I don’t know your name

Must be some way to repay you
Out of all the good you gave
If a rumor should delay you
love seems so little to save

by Richard Manuel
from Music From Big Pink
The Band

Melissa Heikkilä in the MIT Technology Review:

I’m stressed and running late, because what do you wear for the rest of eternity?

This makes it sound like I’m dying, but it’s the opposite. I am, in a way, about to live forever, thanks to the AI video startup Synthesia. For the past several years, the company has produced AI-generated avatars, but today it launches a new generation, its first to take advantage of the latest advancements in generative AI, and they are more realistic and expressive than anything I’ve ever seen. While today’s release means almost anyone will now be able to make a digital double, on this early April afternoon, before the technology goes public, they’ve agreed to make one of me.

More here.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Proteins are biological workhorses. They build our bodies and orchestrate the molecular processes in cells that keep them healthy. They also present a wealth of targets for new medications. From everyday pain relievers to sophisticated cancer immunotherapies, most current drugs interact with a protein. Deciphering protein architectures could lead to new treatments. That was the promise of AlphaFold 2, an AI model from Google DeepMind that predicted how proteins gain their distinctive shapes based on the sequences of their constituent molecules alone. Released in 2020, the tool was a breakthrough half a decade in the making. But proteins don’t work alone. They inhabit an entire cellular universe and often collaborate with other molecular inhabitants like, for example, DNA, the body’s genetic blueprint.

This week, DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs released a big new update that allows the algorithm to predict how proteins work inside cells. Instead of only modeling their structures, the new version—dubbed AlphaFold 3—can also map a protein’s interactions with other molecules. For example, could a protein bind to a disease-causing gene and shut it down? Can adding new genes to crops make them resilient to viruses? Can the algorithm help us rapidly engineer new vaccines to tackle existing diseases—or whatever new ones nature throws at us? “Biology is a dynamic system…you have to understand how properties of biology emerge due to the interactions between different molecules in the cell,” said Demis Hassabis, the CEO of DeepMind, in a press conference. AlphaFold 3 helps explain “not only how proteins talk to themselves, but also how they talk to other parts of the body,” said lead author Dr. John Jumper.

More here.

Lucas Chancel in Nature:

As radical as they might seem, calls for limits on wealth are as old as civilization itself. The Hebrew Bible and Torah recognized years during which debts should be cancelled, slaves set free and property redistributed from rich to poor. In classical Greece, Aristotle praised cities that kept wealth inequality in check to enhance political stability. And in 1942, then-US president Franklin D. Roosevelt argued that annual incomes should be capped at the current equivalent of US$480,000.

In Limitarianism, Dutch and Belgian economist and philosopher Ingrid Robeyns argues that it’s time for twenty-first-century governments to do the same. She explores what setting limits on wealth ownership might mean, and why our societies should want to do so. It is a fresh take on a much-needed discussion at a time when, for example, the richest 1% of the US population owns about as much wealth as the bottom 90%.

More here.

Jonathan Kandell in the New York Times:

Mr. Simons equipped his colleagues with advanced computers to process torrents of data filtered through mathematical models, and turned the four investment funds in his new firm, Renaissance Technologies, into virtual money printing machines.

Medallion, the largest of these funds, earned more than $100 billion in trading profits in the 30 years following its inception in 1988. It generated an unheard-of 66 percent average annual return during that period.

That was a far better long-term performance than famed investors like Warren Buffett and George Soros achieved.

More here.  Also see this, “RIP to the man who beat the efficient market hypothesis” by Eric Hoel.