Kim Stanley Robinson: "If the World Fails, Business Fails"

Loud alarms sound from seat to seat on my train journey from London to Rotterdam. As we zoom past the waterlogged fields of northern France, passengers’ smartphones flash up one by one with an automated government alert: “Exceptional floods are under way . . . take refuge on high ground.”

The world is approaching the “zombie years” of natural disasters and rapidly warming temperatures as imagined by my lunch date, the science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future struck a chord with the climate anxious, just as his bestselling epics from the 1990s and 2000s, in which humans colonise the Moon and other solar systems, spoke to a more optimistic era of government-led space exploration.

At the opening of The Ministry for the Future, 20mn people die in a 2025 heatwave in Uttar Pradesh, India. One of the closest real-life equivalents to this disaster was when early monsoon floods, swollen by glacier melt, swept through Pakistan last year. “One-third of the country’s [districts] underwater and everybody displaced. That [was] apocalyptic,” Robinson says. “Now I’m meeting policymakers and powerful people who are terrified and want to act. That’s new in my experience.”

I’m lucky to catch the author of these grotesque visions at all, I realise, as we settle in for a glass of dry Sauvignon Blanc and a complimentary platter of cheesy pear tartlets in the efficiently posh hotel where Robinson is staying in the Dutch port city. In recent years, Robinson has become a sounding board for politicians, economists and climate negotiators eager for his take on fringe ideas such as pumping water under glaciers to stop them melting, or “carbon quantitative easing”, whereby central banks would pay the worst polluters to stop.

Like many of Robinson’s more than 20 novels, including Pacific Edge and Red Mars, The Ministry for the Future is mostly a tale of people scrambling for financial, political and scientific solutions to civilisational breakdown. And people are hungry for solutions right now. (...)

“What people find encouraging in the book is that we could repeatedly fuck up and have a lot of humans fighting vigorously to wreck the world and wreck our plans, and we could still get to a good result,” Robinson tells me. This message can replace “feelings of futility or despair” with “relatively justifiable hope”, he adds. “People grab this book like it’s a life raft or a life ring out in the ocean.” (...)

Scientists and politicians, not businesspeople, are the heroes of Robinson’s books. He claims that The Ministry for the Future gave a much broader platform to the concept of the fatal heat stress known as “wet bulb temperature” — a way of saying that “if things get hot and humid enough, humans will die automatically”. While the theoretical limit to human tolerance for heat and humidity was already known, in part thanks to a 2010 paper, policymakers had not properly thought through its consequences as a result of climate change. “Ministry is like the first mass-market, general cultural publication of this idea that is quite obvious.”

Robinson says science fiction is more of a “modelling exercise” than a “prediction”, serving to draw public attention to under-discussed scientific theories. “You tell the story in an attempt to forestall it by informing people in advance.”

 
His next novel is likely to be set in the Arctic, where scientists are debating controversial ideas for manipulating the climate in a bid to stop the region’s self-fulfilling feedback loop of ice melt and warming waters. The techniques, which could be implemented in polar regions and elsewhere, range from injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to underwater curtains that shield glaciers from warm water, or seeding massive algae blooms that can sink carbon to the seafloor.

 
Some of these suggestions have alarmed certain groups of scientists who see hubris and the potential for distraction where Robinson sees noble desperation. “I see immense resistance to geoengineering that is ignorant and reflexive and comes out of a moral calculus of, like, 1990,” he says. The moral hazard associated with continuing to burn fossil fuels because of the existence of an escape clause is “not relevant”, he adds. “We know we have to decarbonise. We know we’re not. It’s desperate.” (...)

His key message is that “in a practical sense . . . if the world fails, business fails.” Insurers, for example, could find it impossible to hike premiums enough to finance the global cost of payouts linked to natural disasters and rising temperatures. “The backstop [provided by the insurance sector to the world] will fail,” is what Robinson told staff at Swiss Re, one of the world’s biggest providers of cover for insurance groups.

Perhaps because of his desire to engage with change-makers in the real world, business leaders sometimes confuse him for a futurist, which he describes as “a bullshit industry” and “a scam”. Science fiction is more subtle, he says. “It really is trying to speculate about futures that might happen. But it’s also a metaphor for how things are now.” (...)

Robinson advocates targeted non-violent protest, which could mean anything from showing up for debates at local council meetings to slashing tyres of the most highly polluting SUVs. “If you have a big honking car in London, its tyres should be flat every time you come back out to it [so that] you [have to] get yourself a little Mini,” he says.

by Kenza Bryan, Financial Times |  Read more:

Image: Hachette Group

[ed. Curretly reading Ministry For the Future, which in some ways can be viewed as the political/scientific/bureaucratic cli-fi alternative to Neal Stephenson's recent Termination Shock (which imagines a swashbuckling rogue billionaire taking matters into his own hands). In both cases geoengineering takes center stage, as it's becoming painfully obvious society will fail to mitigate climate change disasters by voluntarily reducing CO2 emissions. It's an excellent book, despite jumping back and forth between gripping narratives and info dumps nearly every other chapter (although, even the info dumps are interesting). It should also send a shiver down the spines of - maybe just several hundred people - with the most influence to prevent climate change but are actively not doing so, and therefore become targets of so-called black wing political and terrorist groups that exist simply to assassinate each over time as planning and opportunity allow - a more direct form of lobbying). Highly recommended. See also: A Sci-Fi Writer Returns to Earth: ‘The Real Story Is the One Facing Us’ (NYT); and, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson review – how to solve the climate crisis (Guardian).]

The Fear and Tension That Led to Sam Altman’s Ouster at OpenAI

Over the last year, Sam Altman led OpenAI to the adult table of the technology industry. Thanks to its hugely popular ChatGPT chatbot, the San Francisco start-up was at the center of an artificial intelligence boom, and Mr. Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, had become one of the most recognizable people in tech.

But that success raised tensions inside the company. Ilya Sutskever, a respected A.I. researcher who co-founded OpenAI with Mr. Altman and nine other people, was increasingly worried that OpenAI’s technology could be dangerous and that Mr. Altman was not paying enough attention to that risk, according to three people familiar with his thinking. Mr. Sutskever, a member of the company’s board of directors, also objected to what he saw as his diminished role inside the company, according to two of the people.

That conflict between fast growth and A.I. safety came into focus on Friday afternoon, when Mr. Altman was pushed out of his job by four of OpenAI’s six board members, led by Mr. Sutskever. The move shocked OpenAI employees and the rest of the tech industry, including Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in the company. Some industry insiders were saying the split was as significant as when Steve Jobs was forced out of Apple in 1985.

But on Saturday, in a head-spinning turn, Mr. Altman was said to be in discussions with OpenAI’s board about returning to the company.

The ouster on Friday of Mr. Altman, 38, drew attention to a longtime rift in the A.I. community between people who believe A.I. is the biggest business opportunity in a generation and others who worry that moving too fast could be dangerous. And the vote to remove him showed how a philosophical movement devoted to the fear of A.I. had become an unavoidable part of tech culture.

Since ChatGPT was released almost a year ago, artificial intelligence has captured the public’s imagination, with hopes that it could be used for important work like drug research or to help teach children. But some A.I. scientists and political leaders worry about its risks, such as jobs getting automated out of existence or autonomous warfare that grows beyond human control.

Fears that A.I. researchers were building a dangerous thing have been a fundamental part of OpenAI’s culture. Its founders believed that because they understood those risks, they were the right people to build it. (...)

In recent weeks, Jakub Pachocki, who helped oversee GPT-4, the technology at the heart of ChatGPT, was promoted to director of research at the company. After previously occupying a position below Mr. Sutskever, he was elevated to a position alongside Mr. Sutskever, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Pachocki quit the company late on Friday, the people said, soon after Mr. Brockman. Earlier in the day, OpenAI said Mr. Brockman had been removed as chairman of the board and would report to the new interim chief executive, Mira Murati. Other allies of Mr. Altman — including two senior researchers, Szymon Sidor and Aleksander Madry — have also left the company.

Mr. Brockman said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that even though he was the chairman of the board, he was not part of the board meeting where Mr. Altman was ousted. That left Mr. Sutskever and three other board members: Adam D’Angelo, chief executive of the question-and-answer site Quora; Tasha McCauley, an adjunct senior management scientist at the RAND Corporation; and Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

They could not be reached for comment on Saturday.

Ms. McCauley and Ms. Toner have ties to the Rationalist and Effective Altruist movements, a community that is deeply concerned that A.I. could one day destroy humanity. Today’s A.I. technology cannot destroy humanity. But this community believes that as the technology grows increasingly powerful, these dangers will arise.

In 2021, a researcher named Dario Amodei, who also has ties to this community, and about 15 other OpenAI employees left the company to form a new A.I. company called Anthropic.

Mr. Sutskever was increasingly aligned with those beliefs. Born in the Soviet Union, he spent his formative years in Israel and emigrated to Canada as a teenager. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, he helped create a breakthrough in an A.I. technology called neural networks.

In 2015, Mr. Sutskever left a job at Google and helped found OpenAI alongside Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk. They built the lab as a nonprofit, saying that unlike Google and other companies, it would not be driven by commercial incentives. They vowed to build what is called artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the brain can do.

Mr. Altman transformed OpenAI into a for-profit company in 2018 and negotiated a $1 billion investment from Microsoft. Such enormous sums of money are essential to building technologies like GPT-4, which was released earlier this year. Since its initial investment, Microsoft has put another $12 billion into the company.

The company was still governed by the nonprofit board. Investors like Microsoft do receive profits from OpenAI, but their profits are capped. Any money over the cap is funneled back into the nonprofit.

As he saw the power of GPT-4, Mr. Sutskever helped create a new Super Alignment team inside the company that would explore ways of ensuring that future versions of the technology would not do harm.

Mr. Altman was open to those concerns, but he also wanted OpenAI to stay ahead of its much larger competitors.

by Cade Metz, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: From left, Mira Murati, interim chief executive; Sam Altman, ousted chief executive; Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and Board member; Ilya Sutskever, also on the company’s board. Credit: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

[ed. Wow. For readers not familiar with the Rationalist/Effective Altruist community (Sam Bankman-Fried was an advocate) visit Less Wrong. There's an open Sam Altman thread: Sam Altman fired from OpenAI, and others, like: Altman firing retaliation incoming?, and this shortform, with details I was unware of: ]

***

"What's the situation?

In the USA: Musk's xAI announced Grok to the world two weeks ago, after two months of training. Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team. Google's Gemini is reportedly to be released in early 2024. OpenAI has confused the world with its dramatic leadership spasm, but GPT-5 is on the way. Google and Amazon have promised billions to Anthropic.

In Europe, France's Mistral and Germany's Aleph Alpha are trying to keep the most powerful AI models unregulated. China has had regulations for generative AI since August, but is definitely aiming to catch up to America. Russia has GigaChat and SistemmaGPT, the UAE has Falcon. I think none of these are at GPT-4's level, but surely some of them can get there in a year or two.

Very few players in this competitive landscape talk about AI as something that might rule or replace the human race. Despite the regulatory diplomacy that also came to life this year, the political and economic elites of the world are on track to push AI across the threshold of superintelligence, without any realistic sense of the consequences."

***

[ed. And this, from the retaliation link above (lots of turmoil and conspiracy speculation):

"OpenAI’s investors are making efforts to bring back Sam Altman, the chief executive who was ousted Friday, said people familiar with the matter, the latest development in a fast-moving chain of events at the artificial-intelligence company behind ChatGPT.

Altman is considering returning but has told investors that he wants a new board, the people said. He has also discussed starting a company that would bring on former OpenAI employees, and is deciding between the two options, the people said.

Altman is expected to decide between the two options soon, the people said. Leading shareholders in OpenAI, including Microsoft and venture firm Thrive Capital, are helping orchestrate the efforts to reinstate Altman. Microsoft invested $13 billion into OpenAI and is its primary financial backer. Thrive Capital is the second-largest shareholder in the company."

***

I won't say money trumps principle all the time, but as Damon Runyon said:

"It may be that the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong — but that’s the way to bet."

So far as we know, it seems to be: pro-alignment faction in OpenAI were concerned, managed to oust Altman, alarums and excursions ensued, Microsoft nearly lost their lives, Altman is now getting (it's fair to imagine) whatever the hell set up he wants at Microsoft - all in order to keep on track to get AI out in a commercial product that will give Microsoft market monopoly as the first to get there and turn on the eternal money fountain.

And that's reality, folks.(ACX)

Travis, Taylor and the Weirdness of Celebrity Relationships

Could it be true love for Taylor and Travis? Sure! Why not?

Do you know how many of the bachelors who have been bachelors on The Bachelor are currently married to the woman they chose in the final episode? As of this writing, one. One! Out of 27 seasons. That is, let's acknowledge, hilarious. But even more hilarious is the fact that reportedly, seven couples are married who have met on various seasons of Big Brother, which is not designed to lead to marriage. The only logical conclusion to draw is that if you want to create lasting relationships, a setup designed to get compatible people married doesn't work as well as locking a bunch of young and horny randos in a house together for a couple of months, feeding them peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and not letting them leave.

As far as we know, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce have never been locked in a house together. As Brittany Luse and crisis PR person Molly McPherson discussed on NPR's It's Been a Minute, Swift (the megastar) and Kelce (the Kansas City Chiefs tight end) are in a PR relationship that is going great guns. And maybe they're in a real relationship, too. Who knows? (...)

In fairness, what kind of a relationship for Taylor Swift would not seem suspicious and publicity-seeking? It's tempting to say "a relationship with an ordinary person," but where in the world would Taylor Swift meet an ordinary person? On Hinge? At the grocery store? At a bar? According to the internet (and the story Kelce told on his podcast), he went to one of her shows in July. He wanted to give her a friendship bracelet with his number on it, but it didn't work, and then the story got out there, and before you knew it, they were maybe/possibly/perhaps dating.

Now, certainly, you can choose to think this is absurd and that what, in fact happened was that her publicists and his publicists met in an underground lair beneath an active volcano, and after ceremonially burning some copies of Us Weekly while chanting "Co-ver! Co-ver! Co-ver!", they schemed to put together this entire story to inure to everyone's benefit, and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce don't even like each other. There is a long history of suspicion that celebrity couples are cooked up for publicity reasons, whether it's because they're in a project together or, more insidiously, because the true nature of somebody's personal life has been deemed a potential liability.

But on the flip side, famous people dating other famous people makes a certain kind of logical sense, over and above the PR advantages. You would need a month-long orientation to date Taylor Swift if you came from any sort of anonymous background — you'd need to understand all the people on her team, how PR works, all kinds of things about confidentiality and safety and security, obligations she has, what it's like to be in the press, what it's like to be watched all the time ... that's a tall order.

Travis Kelce, on the other hand, had a dating show on E! back in 2016 called Catching Kelce, which, according to Vanity Fair, was being pretty successfully memory-holed until he connected with Swift. (...)

You don't have to believe Taylor Swift is any sort of victim — at all — to think that it's functionally impossible for a normie to casually date a person as famous as she is who handles the rest of her life the way she does. Yes, she could have someone smuggled in and out of her hotel in a laundry cart, she could decline to comment on her personal life, and she could decide not to share herself with her fans beyond what happens on stage. But that would be a reversal of her entire oversharing strategy, in which her friends are part of her persona and her broken heart is part of her persona. This is exactly how Taylor Swift would be behaving if she were in a fake relationship with Travis Kelce, sure. But this is also exactly how Taylor Swift would be behaving if she were in a real relationship with Travis Kelce.

She lives this way. She shows up at things. She is the most animated person in the audience at any awards show. Given all that, dating somebody who's already famous is both the most strategic thing for her to do and the most sensible thing for her to do. (And listen, she's almost six feet tall. Maybe she likes a tall guy and was intrigued by the fact that a 6'5" football player wanted to give her a friendship bracelet.) (...)

It doesn't matter to anybody else's life whether this relationship is real or not, nor is it something you can figure out from watching her watching him or watching them leave a football game together. Maybe it's PR. Maybe it's lust. Maybe it's going to be over in a month. Maybe it's going to last. Maybe she's going to write a song someday heavily hinting that somebody who wore pads and a helmet betrayed her. It's a weird and beautiful and ultimately unimportant thing: Who knows?

by Linda Holmes, NPR |  Read more:

Image: Amy Sussman/Getty Images.
[ed. She's got my number just in case. See also: Real relationship aside, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are 100% in a PR relationship (NPR).]

Not All 'Pow-Wow'

From Reservation Dogs to reggae rock: celebrating the amazing things Natives are doing right now.

The state of Arizona is not among those that recognises Indigenous Peoples Day as a public holiday but this year, for the first time, the sprawling city of Phoenix is. An open-air market in a downtown park has been set up to celebrate all things Native American – jewellery, food, clothing – bringing their creators from all across the south-west.

At one end of the park is a low stage, and throughout the late summer day, musicians from Indigenous communities far across the US have been performing. Now, after dark, in the Arizona heat, Ed Kabotie is dangling his legs off the tailgate of a battered pickup, beer in hand.

Kabotie has driven down from the Hopi reservation 200 miles north of here to play with his reggae-rock band, the Yoties. And he is keen to tell his story, one that weaves in and out of his identity as Native American, as it does for most musicians here gathered together under the banner of Native Guitars Tour, a collective of Indigenous artists promoting Native music, art and fashion that advocates for greater cultural and economic representation.

Kabotie, who is Hopi, emphasises that the vision of Indigenous life that is presented online or in films is frequently generalised, crudely drawn or misleading.

“It’s important that people recognise that a Hopi is not a Havasupai, and a Havasupai is not an Apache,” he says. “We don’t all have casinos, and some of our governments hate that shit. We’re not all pow-wow people, and the pow-wow culture that you see isn’t necessarily an internal tribal culture. For some it is, for others it’s not.”

Where Kabotie is from, “a lot of people don’t have running water and electricity … we don’t have stores and it’s two hours to get to a hospital. All that being said, I like it. It’s not representative of every Native culture, it’s just one, whatever that is.”

Soon after we speak, Wavelengths, a Navajo-Zuni powerpop band from Shiprock, New Mexico, come on. “We’re trying to inspire ordinary Native Americans that you can do more than stay at home,” says their singer-guitarist Cody Waybenais. “I feel we are reaching a point where all of us, all Indigenous people, are collectively worldwide, all directions; all tribes are finally reaching a world platform.” (...)

But how real is real, and who gets to channel that reality, remains contentious. Devery Jacobs, a Canadian First Nations actor who stars in Reservation Dogs, recently critiqued Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, calling it “painful, gruelling, unrelenting and unnecessarily graphic” in its depiction of a series of murders of members of the Osage Nation tribe in 1920s Oklahoma.

The bands in Arizona are not – and may never be – competing with the giants of the music business, but the point is clear: Native American arts and cultural expression that were once limited to their localities are gaining a wider reach. The social and economic filters that once isolated and constrained Indigenous voices are lifting.

by Edward Helmore, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Reservation Dogs/Hulu/YouTube

[ed. Spirit apparently appears every time Bear gets knocked out (which is often). Man, I have to see this show but unfortunately don't have Hulu. See also: Reservation Dogs review – a stereotype-smashing, Tarantino-esque triumph (The Guardian). Besides the video below, more words of wisdom from Spirit here (YT).]

Eat, Poop, Die

What happened to Washington's wildlife after the largest dam removal in US history. Sometimes the best thing we can do to restore nature is just get out of the way.

The man made flood that miraculously saved our heroes at the end of O Brother Where Art Thou were an actual occurrence in the 19th and 20th century — and a fairly common one at that — as river valleys across the American West were dammed up and drowned out at the altar of economic progress and electrification. Such was the case with Washington State's Elwha river in the 1910s. Its dam provided the economic impetus to develop the Olympic Peninsula but also blocked off nearly 40 miles of river from the open ocean, preventing native salmon species from making their annual spawning trek. However, after decades of legal wrangling by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, the biggest dams on the river today are the kind made by beavers. (...)

When construction began in 1910, the Elwha Dam was designed to attract economic development to the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, supplying the growing community of Port Angeles with electric power. It was one of the first high-head dams in the region, with water moving more than a hundred yards from the reservoir to the river below. Before the dam was built, the river hosted ten anadromous fish runs. All five species of Pacific salmon — pink, chum, sockeye, Chinook, and coho — were found in the river, along with bull trout and steelhead. In a good year, hundreds of thousands of salmon ascended the Elwha to spawn. But the contractors never finished the promised fish ladders. As a result, the Elwha cut off most of the watershed from the ocean and 90 percent of migratory salmon habitat.

Thousands of dams block the rivers of the world, decimating fish populations and clogging nutrient arteries from sea to mountain spring. Some have fish ladders. Others ship fish across concrete walls. Many act as permanent barriers to migration for thousands of species.

By the 1980s, there was growing concern about the effect of the Elwha on native salmon. Populations had declined by 95 per cent, devastating local wildlife and Indigenous communities. River salmon are essential to the culture and economy of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. In 1986, the tribe filed a motion through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to stop the relicensing of the Elwha Dam and the Glines Canyon Dam, an upstream impoundment that was even taller than the Elwha. By blocking salmon migration, the dams violated the 1855 Treaty of Point No Point, in which the Klallam ceded a vast amount of the Olympic Peninsula on the stipulation that they and all their descendants would have “the right of taking fish at usual and accustomed grounds.” The tribe partnered with environmental groups, including the Sierra Club and the Seattle Audubon Society, to pressure local and federal officials to remove the dams. In 1992, Congress passed the Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act, which authorized the dismantling of the Elwha and Glines Canyon Dams.

The demolition of the Elwha Dam was the largest dam-removal project in history; it cost $350 million and took about three years. Beginning in September 2011, coffer dams shunted water to one side as the Elwha Dam was decommissioned and destroyed. The Glines Canyon was more challenging. According to Pess, a “glorified jackhammer on a floating barge” was required to dismantle the two-hundred-foot impoundment. The barge didn’t work when the water got low, so new equipment was helicoptered in. By 2014, most of the dam had come down, but rockfall still blocked fish passage. It took another year of moving rocks and concrete before the fish had full access to the river.

The response of the fish was quick, satisfying, and sometimes surprising. Elwha River bull trout, landlocked for more than a century, started swimming back to the ocean. The Chinook salmon in the watershed increased from an average of about two thousand to four thousand. Many of the Chinook were descendants of hatchery fish, Pess told me over dinner at Nerka. “If ninety percent of your population prior to dam removal is from a hatchery, you can’t just assume that a totally natural population will show up right away.” Steelhead trout, which had been down to a few hundred, now numbered more than two thousand.

Within a few years, a larger mix of wild and local hatchery fish had moved back to the Elwha watershed. And the surrounding wildlife responded too. The American dipper, a river bird, fed on salmon eggs and insects infused with the new marine-derived nutrients. Their survival rates went up, and the females who had access to fish became healthier than those without. They started having multiple broods and didn’t have to travel so far for their food, a return, perhaps, to how life was before the dam. A study in nearby British Columbia showed that songbird abundance and diversity increased with the number of salmon. They weren’t eating the fish — in fact, they weren’t even present during salmon migration. But they were benefiting from the increase in insects and other invertebrates.

Just as exciting, the removal of the dams rekindled migratory patterns that had gone dormant. Pacific lamprey started traveling up the river to breed. Bull trout that had spent generations in the reservoir above the dam began migrating out to sea. Rainbow trout swam up and down the river for the first time in decades. Over the years, the river started to look almost natural as the sediments that had built up behind the dams washed downstream.

by Andrew Tarantola, Endgadget |  Read more:

Image: Hatchette Books
[ed. Long, long overdue, here and elsewhere. An artifact of competition between the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers over land development and water policy in the western United States during the post-Depression era, when over 250,000 dams were contructed (as described in the excellent Cadillac Desert).  Next on deck: Klamath River (Iron Gate Reservoir). See: After the Flood (Science):]

"In early 2024, operators will open the floodgates on the 49-meter-high dam that blocks the Klamath River, allowing the more than 50 million tons of water it impounds to begin to drain. Once it’s gone, heavy equipment will dismantle the structure. All that will remain of the 11-kilometer-long reservoir that filled the valley for 60 years will be steep-sided slopes coated in gray mud, split once again by a free-flowing river."

Turning Hums into Melodies

and also:

YouTube's first AI-generated music tools can clone artist voices and turn hums into melodies (Endgadget)

Images: YouTube

[ed. Great, just what we need: more music without musicianship. Why would anyone actually want to learn to play an instrument? Can't imagine.]

Macrobiome

XKCD, Gut Fauna

via:

Storm Patrol

In the Nineteenth Century, Scientists Set Out to Solve the “Problem of American Storms”

To fully appreciate the modern-day marvel that is the National Weather Service, it’s useful to start with numbers. There’s 6.3 billion. (The number of observations the agency collects and analyzes every day.) There’s 1.5 million. (The number of forecasts it issues each year.) There’s 184 and 100,000. (The number of weather balloons NWS releases every day, including on weekends and holidays, and the number of feet said balloons can rise into the atmosphere.) And there’s 90 percent. (The average accuracy of a five-day forecast.)

There’s also zero. That’s the approximate number of minutes a typical American like you or me spends wondering about the weather information we access every single day via print newspapers or public radio stations or the hour-by-hour forecasts delivered courtesy of the phones we carry. The ubiquitousness of those updates, the fact that we don’t consider them at all, is a testament to just how much modern meteorology has spoiled us and—probably more than anything else—a tribute to the National Weather Service’s success.

This blasé attitude would have astounded the colonists who arrived in the New World from Europe during the seventeenth century and found North American weather to be, in a word, hellish. They sent letters home describing the climate in apocalyptic terms. When it rained, wrote one colonist in New Sweden, on the Delaware River, “the whole sky seems to be on fire, and nothing can be seen but smoke and flames.” “Intemperate” was how a missionary from Rhode Island described it. “Excessive heat and cold, sudden violent changes of weather, terrible and mischievous thunder and lightning, and unwholesome air” created an environment that was “destructive to human bodies.”

The harshness of the weather—with its extreme seasons and severe storms—wasn’t just an unpleasant surprise. It was also confusing. Among the various, sketchy assumptions that the Europeans had brought with them to their new home was the idea that a location’s climate was directly correlated to its latitude. By the colonists’ logic, the seasons in Newfoundland should resemble those in Paris, and crops grown in Spain should thrive in Virginia. Instead, the olive trees imported from the Mediterranean died in the frozen ground during the mid-Atlantic winters, and the beer went sour in the summer heat. American settlers could have consulted with the resident experts—the Native Americans who had lived in the eastern part of the continent for thousands of years and knew more about the local climate than anyone else. But they generally didn’t. (“Descriptions of local indigenous knowledge in early colonial narratives,” the historian Sam White noted in his book A Cold Welcome, “are mostly conspicuous by their absence.”)

The volatile weather in the eastern United States differs from the more moderate climates of western Europe because it is largely controlled by eastward-flowing air masses that approach over land instead of air masses that arrive from over the ocean and cause temperatures to shift more gradually. And the tail end of a regional cooling period known as the Little Ice Age was, at the time of the Europeans’ arrival, still exacerbating North American winters. But the colonists had no way of knowing either of these things. Instead, the weather remained an intriguing and stubbornly unpredictable puzzle, one that was soon taken on by the new Americans who began to collect their own data, taking measurements and comparing notes with fellow observers.

A surprising number of Founding Fathers were weather enthusiasts, among them James Madison, the avid storm-tracker Benjamin Franklin (credited, among his other more electrifying feats, with first charting the Gulf Stream), and George Washington, who kept weather diaries on and off, making his final entry on the wintry December day before he died: “Morning Snowing & abt. 3 Inches deep.”

It’s safe to say, however, that no American president was as enthusiastic about meteorology, nor as obsessive in his data collection, as Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s first existing weather journal begins on July 1, 1776, while he was in Philadelphia for the signing of the Declaration of Independence. For the next 50 years (with some occasional lapses) he meticulously logged his observations in columns that tracked barometric pressure readings, wind speeds, temperature, and other natural phenomena such as frosts and springtime bird sightings. The notes he left are so detailed and extensive that researchers are currently in the process of digitizing them so they can learn more about what those seemingly baffling weather patterns of the eighteenth and nineteenth century might tell us about our own.

Jefferson was a proselytizer for weather diaries—he was the one who sold his fellow president Madison on the idea of keeping one—and he communicated with correspondents as far north as Québec and as far south as Mississippi about their observations. Various distractions (serving as minister to France, founding the University of Virginia, a stint as the nation’s third president) prevented him from achieving his dream—“this long-winded project,” he called it—of creating a national meteorological service. If he’d survived another decade or so, he would have been around to see the invention that would revolutionize the field of meteorology and make his vision possible.

That invention was not a scientific tool, it was a communications device. And its inventor was not a scientist, but a painter. In 1837, Samuel F. B. Morse received a patent for his new “Electro Magnetic Telegraph,” which would astonish a crowd of onlookers at its debut seven years later in Baltimore. As the receiving operator decoded the message that had just flashed like magic across a wire from an office miles away in Washington, D.C., no one was thinking about what this incredible new device might mean for the weather. But newly employed telegraph operators with time on their hands quickly caught on. Jeptha Homer Wade, one of the founders of Western Union, would later recall:

I commenced operation in a telegraph office in 1846. With the small amount of commercial business then on the lines, the employees had less to do than they have now, and it was quite common for the operators in different parts of the country to enquire of each other about the weather, such as the direction and force of the wind as nearly as we could guess it, together with the temperature and its changes from time to time at different points. . . . I would frequently write upon the bulletin board in my office, what and when weather changes were coming. Frequently this was with such accuracy as to create considerable comment and wonder.

The operators had discovered something both interesting and paradoxical, the writer Andrew Blum observes in his book The Weather Machine. The telegraph had collapsed time but, in doing so, it had somehow simultaneously created more of it. Now people could see what the future held before it happened; they could know that a storm was on its way hours before the rain started falling or the clouds appeared in the sky. This new, real-time information also did something else, Blum points out. It allowed weather to be visualized as a system, transforming static, localized pieces of data into one large and ever-shifting whole.

by Alyson Foster, National Endowment for the Humanities |  Read more:

Image: Albert Bierstadt, A Storm in the Rocky Mountains, Mt. Rosalie

Operation Root Canal

Banksy, Spy Booth
Image: via
How the Drug War Convinced America to Wiretap the Digital Revolution - Operation Root Canal (NEH).

Baby Boomers Are Buying Up All the Houses

For the last 36 years, Rick and Laura Zinnick had a life in Nevada. But when their son and grandchildren decided to relocate to Oklahoma City, the Zinnicks decided to follow them, putting their four-bedroom house on one-third of an acre up for sale.

The decision worked out well. That house sold for $480,000, giving the Zinnicks a windfall. They found a more manageable, one-story home in Oklahoma for $275,000 that was close to their family. And for the first time in their lives, they paid all cash, dodging soaring mortgage rates.

“This move was meant for us,” said Laura Zinnick, 77. “I’m so glad we’ve been able to buy this house later in our life.”

The Zinnick’s aren’t alone: Older buyers are prevailing in America’s hot housing market. This year, the median age for a repeat buyer - someone who has bought a home before - was 58, according to data released Monday by the National Association of Realtors. That’s down just a smidgen from last year’s record of 59, but it’s up significantly from 36 years old in 1981, when NAR began conducting its survey.

Lately, grandparents have been edging out younger buyers who are struggling to get into the market for the first time. Nowadays, first-time buyers make up 32 percent of the market, well below an average of 38 percent since 1981, according to NAR. They’re also more likely to be in their mid-30s today, in contrast to their late 20s in the early 1980s.

The result is yet another quirk of the post-covid economy, and in particular, a housing market that has proved remarkably strong. As the Federal Reserve hoisted interest rates to 22-year highs, the widespread expectation was that a subsequent spike in mortgage rates would zap buyer demand. But even while the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage approaches 8 percent, the housing downturn was short-lived.

And in the meantime, a new picture is emerging of the buyers who still find a way to get a house: They’re older, and because many of them sold a home before buying, they’re also wealthier.

“We are still talking about an incredibly difficult market for first-time buyers to enter, even if there’s slightly less competition,” said Jessica Lautz, the deputy chief economist at NAR. “If there’s a multi-offer situation, an all-cash buyer or someone who has a lot of equity is likely to win. And that person is going to be older.”

There are many reasons. For starters, older buyers are also likely to be selling a house, which provides them fresh cash. Indeed, the typical home seller was 60 years old in 2023, according to NAR, the same as last year.

And with so few homes available, sellers often go with the potential buyer making the most attractive offer - be it a large down payment, stellar credit or all cash. There, too, older buyers have a leg up.

Jennifer Dodds sees that dynamic in the Houston area, where the median sale price has jumped from around $275,000 to $325,000 in the past three years, according to Redfin. As a real estate agent working primarily with seniors, Dodds focuses on helping older buyers find their next homes, and she’s often scouring for one-story houses that work best for shoppers who are downsizing but aren’t yet looking to move into assisted-living centers or senior communities. (According to NAR, 70 percent of recent buyers did not have children under the age of 18 in their homes, the highest share recorded, and well above 42 percent in 1985.)

Gone are the days of out-of-control bidding wars, which defined the market during the pandemic. But Dodds said there still can be a clear advantage for older buyers who have built up their wealth and income over decades and routinely emerge at the top of the pack. (...)

All the boomer buyers are keeping housing inventory - which wasn’t plentiful to begin with - even tighter.

by Rachel Siegel, The Washington Post/ADN | Read more:
Image: Matt Rourke/AP
[ed. Another example of why ageism is so persistent (see below). But, on another level, why do developers keep building expensive McMansions when there's clearly a huge market for mid-level homes? Probably for the same reason they keep building massive SUV's and pickups (that cost more than some mid-level homes) - because society's wealth inequities encourage it. Plus. America. Bigger is always better (fives acre homesites, one acre lawn, four acres weeds).]

Joni Mitchell’s Legacy Is Just Beginning

If you want a refresher course on the incredible, unique power of Joni Mitchell‘s music, take a trip back to Gordon Lightfoot’s living room. It’s 1975, and Mitchell is traveling with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue tour, wearing a black beret and strumming an acoustic guitar on a new song she’s just written. Lightfoot and Roger McGuinn are hovering behind, while Dylan accompanies her on guitar. Unlike that time she played him Court and Spark, Bob isn’t falling asleep. Instead, he and the other dudes are completely transfixed, hearing this brand-new stunner about romantic freedom and loneliness on the road. They’ve all lived it, but none of them can sum it up the way she does. She calls this one “Coyote.”

That clip, which resurfaced in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 Rolling Thunder Revue doc, currently has 3.5 million views. “Holy Jesus, what did I just stumble upon?” one comment reads. “This is hypnotizing, I had never heard of this song prior to 20 minutes ago,” another says. One subscriber is incredibly honest: “When I was younger I never got the appeal of Joni Mitchell, now I’m kicking myself for not realizing sooner in my life how great she is.”

This kind of discourse is expected today, but it wasn’t always the case. Mitchell has been on this earth for 80 years, but we’ve only started to truly appreciate her the way she deserves in the last five. In that timeframe, she’s received countless awards, from the Kennedy Center Honors to the MusiCares Person of the Year award to the Library of Congress’ Gershwin Prize for Popular Song — belated accolades from a world rushing to make up for lost time. At first, Mitchell (still recovering from a 2015 brain aneurysm) stayed largely off the radar while all this happened. Following a tentative return to the public eye in 2019, she performed her first full set in over 20 years at the 2022 Newport Folk Festival; a year later, she tore it up at the Gorge Amphitheater for more than 25,000 fans. She’s also been revisiting her catalog with an archive series, looking back on her stunning body of work while giving her newfound Gen Z and millennial following new releases to discover.

That following, by the way, is massive. To name just a few examples: Olivia Rodrigo recently became a Joni fan while vacationing in Hawaii; Clairo named her dog after Joni; Harry Styles embarked on a mythical dulcimer quest after hearing the instrument on Blue; and to teens on Tiktok, she’s officially on a Stevie Nicks level of coolness.  

All of this is to say: Welcome to the Jonissance.

Lifelong Joni fans might roll their eyes at how ridiculously overdue all of this recognition is — I certainly did. There was never a moment where I was formally introduced to Mitchell’s music. It was just always around me, whether through CDs in the car or my mother’s humming while she cooked tomato sauce on the stove. But in many circles, it wasn’t considered cool to like Mitchell in the early-to-mid aughts. I even remember my friends teasing me for liking Blue in school. “What is this old music, and why is her voice like that?” Skip to 2023, and the kids are all demanding to know how to get that voice.

by Angie Martoccio, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: YouTube/Martin Scorsese Rolling Thunder Review

[ed. Stevie Nicks level of coolness? Haha!...hardly. One could even make the case that Joni's more of a popular music genius than Bob Dylan (though less culturally influencial, and maybe not quite the level of Paul McCartney, but...). The songwriting, voicings, altered tunings, genre hopping dexterity and instrumental complexities of her entire oeuvre have always been consistently astounding/outstanding. Something you can't say about Dylan. And while we're on the subject of iconic female musicians, check out this interview with Dolly Parton on her new rock album "Rockstar", the Super Bowl, and "I Don’t Want It to Be Half-Ass Country" (Hollywood Reporter).]

Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)

Rock ’n’ Soul: The Amazing Story of Sly & the Family Stone

It is difficult to convey just how astoundingly unlikely it is that this book exists. Sly Stone is one of pop music’s truest geniuses and greatest mysteries, who essentially disappeared four decades ago in a cloud of drugs and legal problems after recording several albums’ worth of incomparable, visionary songs. Fleeting, baffling, blink-and-you-miss-him appearances at his 1993 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction and a 2006 Grammy tribute only served as reminders that he was still alive and still not well.

Which makes it almost impossible to set expectations for this memoir. If Amelia Earhart or the Loch Ness Monster released an autobiography tomorrow, would we complain about the unanswered questions or devour any glimpse we get into such mythic characters?

“Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” — named for Sly & the Family Stone’s monumentally funky 1969 No. 1 hit — is the first title from Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s new publishing imprint, and even the drummer/author/filmmaker acknowledges that it isn’t a definitive story. “There is plenty, too, that is not here,” writes Questlove, who is currently working on a Sly Stone documentary, in the foreword. “Some of the musical questions that I would have loved to talk about with the 30-year-old Sly, or the 40-year-old Sly, seem harder for him to recapture, mountains in the mist.”

Artists from the Jackson 5 to Prince, Miles Davis to D’Angelo borrowed elements of Stone’s sound and style, and his songs have been sampled hundreds of times, by the likes of Janet Jackson, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys, but no one else has fully conjured the remarkable balance of virtuosity and universality, joy and pain, rhythmic sophistication and nursery rhyme singalongs of “Everyday People” or “Family Affair.” (...)

Sylvester Stewart was born into a musical family (“There were seven of us, and the eighth member of the family was music”), and he started singing and recording with his siblings at a young age, soon joining a series of high school and regional bands. He talked his way into a radio job in San Francisco, where he took on his new moniker. “There was a tension in the name,” he writes. “Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid.”

The D.J. gig led to songwriting and producing work. His sense of discipline is striking: studying music theory at community college, rehearsing nonstop, jumping to an in-studio piano and playing along to every song he spins on the airwaves (and always announcing the temperature as 59 degrees; “I am not sure why except that it was cool”).

Soon, he assembled the men and women, friends and relations, who made up the Family Stone, very intentionally a mixed-race and -gender ensemble. “The band had a concept — white and Black together, male and female both, and women not just singing but playing instruments,” Stone says. “That was a big deal back then and it was a big deal on purpose.”

It took a couple of albums to distill all of his influences and ambitions, and then came an explosion. A fleet of hit singles between 1967 and 1973 turned the Family Stone into one of America’s top touring bands, especially after their show-stopping performance at Woodstock became a highlight in the immensely popular film documenting the festival. “I didn’t see it but someone told me I was the star,” he writes — while elsewhere he notes that “after Woodstock, everything glowed.”

Stone breezes through the making of such earthshaking albums as “Stand!” and “Fresh,” though he looks a bit closer at “There’s a Riot Goin’ On” (1971), a hazy, slowed-down and reflective set that felt like the hangover following the exuberance of the ’60s. “I was digging down into a place where people hadn’t been before,” he writes.

By the time of “Riot,” though, drugs had also entered Sly Stone’s life, and they would define the many years that followed. He was feeling pressure to write, to record, to tour. “All of that needed to be fueled,” he says wryly. “But how did that fuel make me feel? A drug is a substance and so the question has substance. A drug can be a temporary escape and so I will temporarily escape that question.” (...)

When Sly started missing concerts and seemed increasingly surrounded by darkness, the conventional wisdom became that Sylvester Stewart and Sly Stone were two distinct people — one bright and fun, the other chaotic and antagonistic. “I didn’t agree with the two-persons-in-one theory,” writes Stone. “In my mind, there was only my mind, with different facets and edges like anyone’s, and that was the mind that minded being probed and prodded, put to someone else’s test.”

by Alan Light, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Alarmy; Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images; AP

[ed. Sly/Prince, flamboyant flip sides of the same creative coin. Check out his Wikipedia. See also: Sly Stone lives to tell the tale of his lifelong journey to heaven, hell and back (LA Times); and, Sly Stone Returns With Alternately Riveting and Horrifying Memoir (Variety).]

“It wasn’t that I didn’t like the drugs,” he writes. “If it hadn’t been a choice between them and life, I might still be doing them. But it was and I’m not.”

Ageing for Beginners: An Unrepresentative Guide

Transcending or cutting across the ageing process itself is the distinction between people who constantly change and people who remain just the same, which is particularly apparent in people who move to new countries or new parts of the same country, and either do change their accents (sometimes overnight) or do not. I knew a very conservative tutor at Cambridge, U.K. with a very upper class accent who one supposed was born in a manor house with a silver spoon in his mouth. In fact he was born on a working-class council house estate in Bristol with an accent he 'changed on the train' on first arrival in Cambridge. But then he was gay at a time it was illegal to be, so he was used to concealment.

Then there is the giving up of youthful bad habits, such as alcohol and cigarettes, or there is the failure to change and reconstruct oneself, which ages people before their time. This inability to change with the times is the failure to develop a rich and supple inner core on whose integrity mythical maturity blooms, balancing (at least at first) the relentless progress of physical decay. Such people are either feckless weathercocks, changing with the latest puff of wind or tortured geniuses who, as was said of Peter Sellers, are 'more seriously fucked up than a chameleon crossing a kilt.' There is a book by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion whose title has always interested me more than its contents: Learning from Experience - one either does or doesn't or does so in some respects and not in others or thinks one has when one hasn't or doesn't think one has when one has.

Other people's views of you come into this, though the same thing is happening to them, for they all see you differently, and to differing extents, at different times. You get to know someone and then forget them in favour of just living with them as a kind of wallpaper bursting into flames from time to time, a process which is either good or it isn't. I put it to you that, for people growing old like me (70 - those in their eighties call me a spring chicken of course), old age is sometimes thrust upon you by the young (or younger), who need there to be someone between them and the grave. One finds oneself coerced into serving all the purposes that old people are supposed to, like exerting authority or standing in their way or knowing everything - a stance the old (or older) involuntarily find themselves complying with, because that's how you're treated. The old did it too, but they forget, and the young will find it happening to them. (...)

Their ugliness and decay is unpardonable, because, if we're lucky, it will one day be ours.

There is little recognition that in relative terms the frail and elderly are all Olympians, perpetually performing feats of effort, agility and endurance that real athletes only manage fleetingly. The accurate lifting of a spoon of porridge to a gaping mouth. The eventual recall of a face or a phone number or what one was saying. An awe-inspiring ascent to the top of a staircase, without a flag to plant on its pinnacle. An arm will eventually become heavier to lift than a dumbbell. Avoiding a fall will become a perpetual tight rope walk along the flexing cable between supposedly undemolishable twin towers.

It is wrong, though, to think the elderly incapable of the greatest evils, simply because they are physically weak. Beware the little old lady with the bomb in her knitting bag. She's heading for her place in an Agatha Christie novel. It was malice, not senility, that prompted that old timer to plough his Lincoln Continental through the crowd in the shopping mall. Elderly tyrants and dictators want to take the world with them as they go, and push the ladder over with the young still climbing it. Merely consider the age distribution of Brexit voters, in whom stupidity and psychopathy became weird bed fellows. What is it some comedian said? ' I can't believe it took a referendum for Britain's youth to find out that old people hate them.'

Yet the young cannot fathom the wisdom of age. As a late adolescent I distinctly remember looking at middle-aged politicians far younger than I am now in suits on television and thinking 'why on earth does anyone let those ugly old gas bags actually rule us, looking like that?' Why should the ugly be powerful? Now I am older than nearly all politicians except the resurgent gerontocracy of the current United States, I often register a shock of recognition when I find out that some old trout is actually younger than me, - and probably looks it! I suffer equal shock in discovering that a good friend is eighteen years younger than I am.

In some respects there is not much difference between some people over 40, though hugely so in others. My mother thought her default setting was 26 right through to the age of 96, and I believed her. I love helping young people when they let me, but I keenly feel how limited their curiosity about me is. Younger academics sometimes automatically assume their work is hipper than mine, but I can often date their intellectual formations back to the early 80s and see them reinventing the wheel. Yet the elderly have no idea to what extent they patronise the young. How could the young be genuinely curious about the old? (...)

I have discovered that there is a kind of international club of people of a certain age who, whatever the differences in country, background, profession and experience, give each other a break in recognition of the fact that they've been through the wringer and come out at the other end and might as well show each other kindness and a smile. It is like a playground experience when the barriers drop in recognition of another joyful child. It also has to do with the grateful recognition that you are not unique after the incredible pressure of having had to differentiate yourself in the work force has ended. There is no longer any point in having to prove yourself.

Though in another sense that never stops. It even intensifies. Let no one think that the quest for status stops after retirement. Class distinctions, Simone de Beauvoir argued, ‘govern the manner in which old age takes hold of a man;’ ‘any statement that claims to deal with old age as a whole must be challenged, for it tends to hide this chasm.’ How well did you do? What is it that stops you from being useless now? What cars, houses, holidays differentiate you from those trapped on state pensions or with nothing at all? I have been to parties of people largely older than myself where someone is bragging about running a vineyard or an avocado farm or is on the board of this or that or is commissioned for their expertise on this and that. What's so great about running a boutique vineyard? At the same party an old Greek man advertised that his ambition in life, which he was clearly able to fulfil, was to sail his yacht back to the seabord town of his childhood and dock it in front of the hovel he grew up in. 'Look how well I've done', was to be the point of his life. I can imagine that the old people's homes of Florida's super-rich have untold means of discriminating gradations of wealth. There really are right wing cruises where you sing karaoke to the music of the Beach Boys (who were young when they were!) substituting 'Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb-Iran' for 'Bar-bar-bar, bar-barbara ann'! I love the idea of such things and want to go on one, just to see, but would be found out, and thrown overboard. (...)

I think perspectives on age change inexorably through life, though in different ways. I also want to write about that strange phenomenon of everything feeling the same for a long time and then experiencing a sudden, unaccountable shift, wherein every thing familiar feels strange. Is it just a feeling or does it represent a lurch towards the end game on the conveyer belt of ageing?

In the buffet car of Eurostar on the way to Paris at the end of April this year there was a white woman in her 60s in fashionable clothes, a smartly dressed young black man and the rest of us. It was these who emerged from the blur into a sharply focused memory. I guess I was eyeing the woman, who though well ‘past her prime,’ must have been very pretty once (I would never wish to use these terms, but read on to find out who she was) and quite stylish - nothing special, mind – but, yes, stylish. I assumed she was French, but she wasn't. Oh no. In an abrasively upper class English voice (I can say this because I’m English) she asked the young black man, also English, where he had got his shoes. They were black and laceless with white rubber surrounds. I found them, later, in a Parisian departmental store and presciently took a photograph of them to illustrate this story, which sadly I can no longer find. Though no Idris Elba, he was tall and thin, with a well-barbered skull and the topiary of a goatee beard contoured to match the lines of his face. He enthusiastically named the London suburb where he bought them and she proceeded to applaud his whole outfit, which I therefore became aware of. He was all in black except for the white rubber around his shoes, but on closer inspection his trousers were a dark green plaid in good wool and his light jacket had tailored pockets, which went with his black t-shirt. She loudly praised them all in front of others, especially the laceless shoes, which made me feel awful, for what about the elastic laces in my dark blue Campers??? Her praise served to insult everyone else in the carriage, and was a vehicle for broadcasting a great deal of status information about herself. Whether we wanted to or not we learned she was a rich and successful fashion curator with a flat in Paris and a son in a successful band, whom her young interlocutor 'probably knew', because it was 'making it' in band world. He didn't know it, but he took out a notebook and made a note of it. He was completely seduced by her initial praise of him as a fashion star and since he was in banking or something, he was, she said, 'to come and see me when you've made a lot of money.' What for? It was beyond her ken that anyone around her could hold different values or conceptions of success. She was a narcissist using this young man to out herself as a star to the whole carriage. Why couldn't he see she was using him? What stopped me walking out with a scornful laugh was that I wanted to hear enough to be able to tell this story. It was a high price to pay. As I left they got set to talk all the way to Paris. He was her accessory during the journey. He stopped her feeling so old.

by Richard Read, Arcade/Stanford Humanities Center |  Read more:

Image: A Way of Flying, Francisco Goya

[ed. Ageism - the last frontier of systemic, persistent discrimination. Why? As this essay notes, probably because most people don't like to think about getting old (including the old themselves). But likely an element of competition for limited resources as well - jobs, housing, healthcare, etc.]

Ci Hua Ren Jian
via:

Numb at the Spectator Summer Party

At the start of the year, I wrote about my descent into the notorious downtown New York scene. A few people seem to have interpreted that thing as a whole-cloth parody of the professionally agonised insiders who keep writing about that set, but that wasn’t it at all. I am not an insider; I’m a tourist. It was about the experience that keeps happening to me, which is hanging out with someone else’s circle of friends. This circle happened to be notorious, a self-aware and self-obsessed little scene, but that’s all a scene is: someone else’s circle of friends, having parties at you.

Anyway, last week I ended up once again hanging out with someone else’s circle of friends. But this time it was the circle of friends that governs the entire country.

I’m still not entirely sure why, but I was invited to the Spectator’s summer party. The Spectator, if you’ve not encountered it, is the world’s longest-running weekly magazine. Two hundred years ago it was a radical liberal journal, these days it’s quite firmly on the right. I write some occasional arts features for them. I don’t like everything they publish, but a magazine that only published the kind of things I like would probably have a circulation of one. The Spectator summer party, meanwhile, is the big event on the London media-political social calendar. Every year, every Tory MP of note shows up to sip champagne as our island slowly crumbles into the sea. The BBC’s ferociously hard-hitting interviewers grin and gossip with the people they are sworn to hold to account. The policy advisors for the government form a gaggle with the policy advisors for the opposition. Everyone can relax: they are among friends. In Britain, all the politicians are former media people who decided to start making the news instead of simply covering it, and all the media people are former politicians easing into their sinecures. It’s all one big club, and you’re not in it. But apparently, I am.

This is what I learned: that they serve a seemingly unlimited amount of booze, but not any canapés. And that Rishi Sunak is much, much shorter than I had imagined.

The party was held in the small shady patio out the back of the Spectator’s offices in Westminster, which for one day only had been transformed into a sort of cattle pen for politicians and their handsome political wives. Everyone was crammed in there with the kind of sheer density of people that usually get classed as a war crime. Far away on the other side of the patio, I witnessed the immense form of Andrew Neil looming over the sea of people like a great ruddy-cheeked oil tanker. Elsewhere, Greyson Perry was decked out like a giant frosted cupcake, causing waves of eye-rolls to radiate from him in every direction. I stood for a moment, trying to catch my bearings, at which point a tiny person with a bottle of Pol Roger manifested at my side and offered to refill my still-full glass. This happened roughly every twenty seconds for the rest of the night. The tiny agency workers ducked and weaved through the crowd like a mass of ferrets. None of them spoke English. Nobody looked them in the eye.

Nearby, former Prime Minister Liz Truss was trying to mingle. She would stand nervously on the edge of a little circle, and then when someone said something sort-of funny she would open her mouth wide, as if she were about to swallow a small rodent whole, and enthusiastically emit a breathy prehistoric cackle. At which point the people around her, suddenly aware of her presence, would shuffle imperceptibly to close their ranks and lock Liz out of the circle. It was very strange to see Liz Truss there, acting so much like herself. Everyone’s unkind image of her, conjured out of a few newspaper headlines and YouTube clips, was, it turned out, exactly bang on. Maybe I still believe that famous people should have some mysterious extra aura when you see them in real life. She should have glowed with a residue of power. But she did not. She was the autistic girl who gets invited to the party as a joke.

Nobody wanted to hang out with Liz Truss, but I did. She felt like a kindred spirit, also out of her depth here, also not quite sure who she was supposed to talk to. I wanted to get to know her. I wanted to learn what it was like to be the Mayfly Queen. I never found out. After a few more attempts to make friends, she strode swiftly out of the party and wasn’t seen again for the rest of the night.

So I did some mingling myself. This is how it would go. I would find myself in conversation with a very genial man in a linen suit, who would monologue at me extensively on some subject I’d never once before considered in my life—the different types of tweed and when it’s appropriate to wear them, or the perils and pitfalls of buying a French winery, or how difficult it is these days to find a maker of bespoke fountain pens that hasn’t been poisoned by woke groupthink. Eventually an editor would elbow his way over through the crowd with a smirk. I never thought I’d see the day, he’d say, Sam’s rubbing shoulders with the Tory cabinet. At which point I’d look again at the very genial man in the linen suit. I did recognise him from somewhere, I’d realise; some ministerial scandal, some unflattering papshot in the Guardian. I don’t really follow the news, I’d admit. Eric Gruggins, the editor would say, is the Secretary of State for Torture. Wait, I’d say, torture? The Right Honourable Eric would give a good hearty laugh. Well I don’t torture anyone myself, he’d say. Unless you count civil servants! This would fail to entirely pacify me. It’s about preventing torture, right? I’d say. Eric would smack his lips. With the departmental budgets we’ve got, he’d say, it may as well be! And then he’d discourse in the same jovial tones about how Britain could be Europe’s next big torture hub if only he had the funds, and about the incredible opportunities offered by something he called Torture 2.0. (...)

Eventually one of the think tank guys had a great idea. Would you like to meet Rishi? he said. His name was Adam Quenengo and he ran an outfit called AngliConnex, which was dedicated to the idea that we could save the British economy and also rebuild a strong sense of national belonging by integrating the entire private sector into the Church of England through a new class of ‘business deacons.’ We’d been talking for a few minutes about nothing very much when he’d suddenly looked at me as if for the first time. Wait, he said, you’re Sam Kriss. I admitted that I was, and he made a kind of bowing we-are-not-worthy motion. I love your writing, he said. Didn’t you use to be on the left? I’m still on the left, I said, and he laughed as if I’d said something very funny. I’ve got a great idea, he said, would you like to meet Rishi? To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure if I wanted to meet the Prime Minister. I’d wanted to meet tragic hopeful Liz Truss; I’d wanted to see if there was anything living behind Boris Johnson’s chummy bluster and dull thuggish eyes. But Rishi Sunak was not, as far as I could tell, a particularly interesting person. His favourite novelist is Jilly Cooper. His favourite TV show is Emily in Paris. His plan to save this stagnant island doesn’t even involve any Mongols or business deacons; he seems to think it’ll all sort itself out if we just keep saying the word blockchain. What would we even have to talk about? More bland chitchat, probably; wineries and pens. But I said sure.

Adam beamed. This’ll be hilarious, he said, you know I think the two of you would really get on. You’re both such thinkers. I scanned the sea of well-groomed heads for one that looked suitably Prime Ministerial. Where is he? I said. I don’t think I’ve glimpsed him all night. Ah, said Adam, you won’t have seen him from up there, he’s actually quite short. Which I did know. In the years before Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister I had, like everyone, assumed that he was a fairly tall man, because he had the gangly proportions of a fairly tall man, and maybe also because he was known to be extremely rich. And his press team had done everything possible to maintain the illusion: he gave all his speeches on top of cleverly hidden boxes and always had himself photographed from below, stuff like that, but when you’re running a country the lie can only last so long. Everyone now knows that Rishi Sunak is a kind of homunculus, proportioned exactly like an adult man but disquietingly smaller, like the travel-sized deodorants you buy at airports. But when Adam dragged me to another corner of the garden, I still couldn’t see the Prime Minister anywhere. Here he is, said Adam, and gestured towards a nondescript-looking white guy in a rather heavy-looking suit, who was very clearly not Rishi Sunak. Uh, I said. The white guy didn’t even acknowledge me. He nodded at Adam, reached into his inside jacket pocket, and retrieved a small, expensive-looking red lacquer case embossed with the Royal Arms. It was only slightly larger than a packet of cigarettes. A slight hush fell around us as the case was opened. Inside was Rishi Sunak, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, First Lord of the Treasury, Minister for the Civil Service, and Minister for the Union; net worth, seven hundred and thirty million pounds. Oh, someone whispered, look, he’s asleep. The handsome political wives all smiled wholesomely to themselves. He was indeed asleep. Rishi Sunak lay curled up in his miniature suit, nestled dreamily in the padding and velvet. His pillow was a single flake of dandruff. His blanket was a postage stamp. Someone had given him a half-thimbleful of Pol Roger, and he was tuckered out for the night. He was dreaming about trade deals. Nuclear submarines skulk the oceans at his command.

by Sam Kriss, Numb at the Lodge |  Read more:

Image: An Election Entertainment, William Hogarth

The Other Side of the Tidal Wave

I guess there’s maybe a 10-20% chance of AI causing human extinction in the coming decades, but I feel more distressed about it than even that suggests—I think because in the case where it doesn’t cause human extinction, I find it hard to imagine life not going kind of off the rails. So many things I like about the world seem likely to be over or badly disrupted with superhuman AI (writing, explaining things to people, friendships where you can be of any use to one another, taking pride in skills, thinking, learning, figuring out how to achieve things, making things, easy tracking of what is and isn’t conscious), and I don’t trust that the replacements will be actually good, or good for us, or that anything will be reversible.

Even if we don’t die, it still feels like everything is coming to an end.

by Katja Grace, LessWrong |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Yes. For examples, see this site: Superhuman (with news of all things AI).]

Google's AI Stoplight Program Calming Traffic in Dozens of Cities

It's been two years since Google first debuted Project Green Light, a novel means of addressing the street-level pollution caused by vehicles idling at stop lights. At its Sustainability ‘23 event on Tuesday, the company discussed some of the early findings from that program and announced another wave of expansions for it.

Green Light uses machine learning systems to comb through Maps data to calculate the amount of traffic congestion present at a given light, as well as the average wait times of vehicles stopped there. That information is then used to train AI models that can autonomously optimize the traffic timing at that intersection, reducing idle times as well as the amount of braking and accelerating vehicles have to do there. It's all part of Google's goal to help its partners collectively reduce their carbon emissions by a gigaton by 2030. (...)

“Today we're happy to share that… we plan to scale to more cities in 2024,” Yael Maguire, Google VP of Geo Sustainability, told reporters during a pre-brief event last week. “Early numbers indicate a potential for us to see a 30 percent reduction in stops. We believe green light is unique because it is more scalable and cost effective for cities than alternative options.” Ideally, cities would deploy the models across grids of neighborhood blocks to create “waves” of propagating green lights.

“Our AI recommendations work with existing infrastructure and traffic systems,” Maguire continued. “City engineers are able to monitor the impact and see results within weeks.” Maguire also noted that the Manchester test reportedly saw improvements to emission levels and air quality rise by as much as 18 percent. The company also touted the efficacy of its Maps routing in reducing emissions, with Maguire pointing out at it had "helped prevent more than 2.4 million metric tons of carbon emissions — the equivalent of taking about 500,000 fuel-based cars off the road for an entire year."

by Andrew Tarantola, Endgadget | Read more:
Image: Google

[ed. Good news! (but maybe 'vertical' integration will be another element to add (see below).]

A Flying Car That Anyone Can Use Will Soon Go On Sale

Electrically powered vertical-take-off-and-landing (evtol) aircraft—flying cars, to the layman—are an idea whose time has not quite yet come, but is fast approaching. Many firms are jostling with each other, offering designs that range from scaled-up multirotor drones, via things which resemble rigid spiders’ webs, to fixed-wing/helicopter hybrids. None of these, however, will be Jetson-like family saloons with dad (or even mum) at the controls. Those flying them will require a pilot’s licence. Most will probably be used initially as sky-going taxis.

One company has, by contrast, stuck to its guns and carried through its original project to create something which people can purchase and pilot themselves. Helix is a single-seat vehicle, so “flying motorbike” might be a more accurate appellation. It has, however, been carefully crafted by its maker, Pivotal, based in Silicon Valley, to be within America’s rules for microlight aircraft. That means anyone, pilot’s licence or not, can fly it over non-built-up areas. As a result, from next year those with $190,000 stuffed down the back of the sofa will be able to order one for personal use—though they will not be able to take delivery until June. (...)

Pilot’s licence or not, buyers will still need to undertake at least some training to fly a Helix. Pivotal insists on this—not least because it worries that an early accident would be catastrophic for sales. For the same reason, the craft’s software will stop the pilot doing anything that does not fit inside its aerodynamic-safety envelope. And if, despite this, something does go wrong, it is fitted with a parachute. Pull the appropriate knob hard and an explosive charge will blast this clear of the fuselage, allowing its canopy to open and carry the aircraft to terra firma.

The Helix’s top speed is a respectable 100kph, but its range is only 30km. And refuelling it is a bit of a pain. Filling up from the mains takes 4½ hours, though a special high-power system similar to those employed for electric cars can bring that down to 75 minutes. Not yet quite the Jetsons, then. But a possible step on—or perhaps above—the road.

by The Economist |  Read more:

Image: The Economist/Pivotal

[ed. Taking bad driving to a new level. Hopefully, the next iteration won't be something like this:]

Image: Flying sushi via: