Month: April 2024

The magical threads from nowhere to somewhere


From a live stream from Heathrow Airport, Monday, April 29, 2024

When Charles Dickens was a young man, he would sit on London Bridge and watch the traffic — the people on the bridge, the ships on the river. Though London was a somewhere rather than a nowhere, it’s easy to imagine that Dickens thought of the faraway places to which the ships were bound, or from which they were coming. In David Copperfield, Dickens’ young hero does the same thing:

“[B]ut I know that I was often up at six o’clock, and that my favourite lounging-place in the interval was old London Bridge, where I was wont to sit in one of the stone recesses, watching the people going by, or to look over the balustrades at the sun shining in the water, and lighting up the golden flame on the top of the Monument. The Orfling met me here sometimes, to be told some astonishing fictions respecting the wharves and the Tower; of which I can say no more than that I hope I believed them myself.”

A common theme in literature is stories that start nowhere but take the reader somewhere as the plot unfolds. Often the stories return to nowhere at the end (because there’s no place like home). One of the reasons we read is to escape the nowhere in which most of us live for a vicarious look at somewhere.

Through the miracle of the global network that we call the Internet, there are new ways of sitting in the stone recesses of London Bridge and watching the world go by. When I discovered the YouTube live stream from London’s Heathrow Airport, I spent an embarrassing amount of time, as though mesmerized, just watching the planes land, one after another, about a minute apart. The chat window identifies the plane and says where it came from — Buenos Aires, maybe, after a long flight, or Edinburgh after a short one — sometimes places I have never been, sometimes places I remember, and sometimes places that I still would like to go.

Then I realized that planes fly over my little piece of nowhere all the time. I also realized that there are apps that can identify those planes as they fly over and reveal where they came from and where they are going. It happens that a great many planes in and out of Atlanta fly right over me on the way to Europe and beyond. In no time at all, I saw (in the app) a plane on its way to Paris that was headed my way. I went out to see if I could see it. My eyes never found it, but I heard it pass over. Paris! Until Notre Dame caught fire, I had not planned to ever go to Paris again. Now I want to see Notre Dame after it has been repaired. Then there was a flight to Rome, a big Airbus that made so much noise that I could hear it through my bedroom window.

The YouTube streaming service from Heathrow is Flight Focus 365. The URL changes a couple of times a day, so you’ll need to select the live stream from the list of videos.

The app, for iPhone and Android, is Plane Finder.


⬆︎ Source: Wikimedia Commons. A square-rigged ship is to previous centuries as an Airbus 380 is today. They’re equally romantic and beautiful, if you think about it in a certain way.

⬇︎ The red airplane icon is Delta flight 66 from Atlanta to Rome. The blue dot is my location.

Update:

As long as we’re talking about Heathrow Airport, I should mention Windsor Castle. Planes approaching Heathrow from the east pass right over Windsor when they’re about six miles from Heathrow. The altitude is low, a little more than 2,000 feet, so if you’ve got a window seat you’ll get a very good look at Windsor Castle. There are stories that Queen Elizabeth II was so accustomed to the sound of airplanes overhead that she could identify airplanes from their sound.

I should also mention Slough, which is visible in the map below. I had wondered how “Slough” is pronounced. The train toward Paddington Station stops at Slough about 25 minutes before Paddington Station. According to the automated voice that calls out the stops, “Slough” rhymes with “how.”

My rabbit hole


AI image by Adobe Firefly. Click here for higher resolution.

Do we all have old friends who have gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories? I certainly do. Arguing never works, does it? The only way I could think of to tell someone that they’ve disappeared down a rabbit hole is to acknowledge that we all have our rabbit hole, furnished in whatever way suits us best. This is what my rabbit hole might look like.

By the way, it is just remarkable how quickly AI imaging has become available. I subscribe to the Adobe Creative Suite, which now includes AI imaging tools.

I’m counting on Apple to do AI right

An article yesterday at MacRumors.com asks “Should Apple Kill Siri and Start Over?” My answer to that would be yes. Siri was (and is) terrible. Siri fell far short of the vision that Apple described in 1987 in the video above, which gets the vision right. Siri was a huge embarrassment for Apple.

I remember watching this video in 1987 at an Apple promotional event, and I’ve never forgotten it. Almost 40 years later, Apple at last is in a position to make the “Knowledge Navigator” a reality.

There’s an important hardware angle here. AI’s need a lot of computing power. AI’s run better on graphics processors than on CPUs. Apple’s M1, M2, and M3 chips are generously supplied with graphics processors. I’m writing this on a 2023 M2 Mac Mini Pro. It has ten CPU cores and sixteen (!) GPU cores. AI’s run very well on Apple’s high-end M2 chips, but it seems that Apple is not going to release M3 models of some of its computers and will skip straight to M4 chips, which are engineered specifically to optimize AI’s.

As for software, we still don’t know much about what Apple is planning. We should hear a lot more at Apple’s annual developers conference, which starts June 10.

It’s interesting that, in its 1987 visionary video, Apple showed its “Knowledge Navigator” being used by a Berkeley professor. Sure, there are plenty of people who would use an AI for sports statistics or investment research. But to really advance human knowledge, we need an AI that has read everything. The best material is behind paywalls — all the daily newspapers, academic papers new and old, new books plus all the older books that have been digitized, and even much of the daily chatter on the web. That’s going to cost a lot of money, but if anyone can figure out how to ethically acquire all that material and pay for it, Apple can.

A major failing of current AI’s is that they don’t attribute anything. My guess is that that’s because the people who are building the currently available AI’s don’t want us to know where they are stealing their training material. But if an AI is to be trusted, and if an AI’s answers are to be suitably weighed for reliability, then the AI must tell us where it got its information with citations and footnotes.

AI development is moving very fast. Acquiring, licensing, and figuring out the economics of the training material is a huge undertaking. Google, my guess is, will try to gouge and steal. Apple, I think, will do a more trustworthy job. In a few years, I expect to have a truly useful Apple AI running on Apple hardware.

At last, a whipporwill

When I was a young’un in North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley, I often heard whipporwills. But in the 16 years I’ve been living in the Blue Ridge foothills, I had never heard a whipporwill until last night. It was very close — in my front yard, or in the edge of the woods that adjoin the yard. The video is terrible — it was almost dark. But you’ll be able to hear the whipporwill.

Down the rabbit hole

Consciousness and Quantum Mechanics. Edited by Shan Gho. Oxford University Press, 2022. 520 pages.

First, a disclaimer. I am by no means qualified to review a book like this. The book is a mix of theoretical physics and the philosophy of physics. Theoretical physics goes way over my head, though I do think I can glimpse the gist of it. The philosophy of physics, though expressed in dense language, is not as dependent on mathematics and differential equations as theoretical physics. A patient and persistent reader can pretty much make sense of the philosophy of physics.

I read books like this even though I cannot completely understand them. I am more than satisfied to settle for understanding as much of it as I can understand. During the past forty years, there have been many excellent books written by scientists for ordinary people, because those scientists wanted as many people as possible to know where science, particularly physics, is headed. I often refer to Roger Penrose as my favorite physicist. He has written several such books. However, in the last ten years or so, as far as I can tell, there have been fewer such books. Thus, if we’re looking for an update on what has been happening in contemporary physics, we need to listen in on what physicists are saying to each other, and then try to follow that as best we can.

This book is a collection of seventeen papers by different authors. The papers cover the leading theories for understanding “the measurement problem,” which seems to involve conscious observers of how tiny particles behave. I won’t try to define the measurement problem here other than linking to the Wikipedia articles on the measurement problem and Schrödinger’s cat. If physicists can solve the measurement problem, that would resolve some profound questions about just what sort of universe we live in.

The thing is, all the theories pretty much go down a rabbit hole. That is not surprising, because what scientists observe in quantum behavior is so strange (think Schrödinger’s cat). It has been almost 90 years since the Schrödinger’s cat thought experiment was proposed, and we still don’t know what’s going on.

Another disclaimer: Many physicists find the ghostliness of some of the theories repugnant. Not me! The more ghosts the better. I’m rooting for the ghosts.

Here’s an example of the distaste for ghosts, in this book’s chapter written by Michael Silberstein and W.M. Stuckey. They are writing about the mysterious nature of matter at the quantum level:

“Rather, panpsychism only makes matter weirder and seemingly less natural. It’s like learning that there are fairies in the world, but then being told to relax because we have decided they are just brute features of fundamental physics.”

Relax? OK. Some philosophers don’t like fairies. But we still don’t know whether there are fairies lurking in fundamental physics. Whatever Silberstein and Stuckey may think, I find the idea of fairies comforting rather than threatening.

One thing I get from this book is that the leading theories all seem to involve some version of panpsychism, the idea that the universe is conscious on some level. Roger Penrose’s theory, my favorite theory, is a panpsychist theory, though it regards objects such as electrons as “proto conscious” — not really conscious but capable of consciousness if organized into a larger unit and somehow “orchestrated,” which is what Penrose and Stuart Hameroff think happens inside the brain to generate consciousness. Nor is Penrose’s invocation of a Platonic domain without theoretical grounding in quantum mechanics. Before a “wave function” “collapses” because it has been observed or measured, it exists as a wide range of uncertainties that have a wide range of probabilities. After the wave function collapses, it is in, and stays in, a known and fixed state, or “eigenstate.” The theory is that certain possible states, ideal states, are favored by the probabilities — hence Platonic. Or, to say it a little differently, there may be natural probabilities that dispose nature to unfold toward ideal Platonic states. Thus, if there exists a Platonic bias in the structure of the universe, we get beauty of form, and we conscious creatures can perceive and work to realize the ideals of the true and the good, the just and the fair.

Some of the theories described in this book are as repugnant to me as fairies are to some people. One such theory is the “many worlds” theory. Many people take the many-worlds theory seriously, though to me it seems to be a ridiculous way of disposing of the measurement problem.

One theory described in this book is a somewhat modified version of the Penrose-Hameroff theory of “orchestrated objective reduction,” a theory that I have been trying to follow for years. The Penrose-Hameroff theory is mentioned in a number of the chapters, and always with respect. Penrose wrote Chapter 13 of this book, and Stuart Hameroff wrote Chapter 14.

The book makes no such judgment, but I might say that Penrose-Hameroff are out ahead with the most plausible — and, to me — the most attractive theory. It’s also the only theory that takes us into the brain and proposes a testable, falsifiable theory on how consciousness arises in the brain. Thus I don’t feel like I am out on a limb in having Penrose-Hameroff as my favorite theory, only because it appeals to me on aesthetic and intuitive rather than scientific grounds, where I am hardly qualified. I want a Platonic universe that is filled with ghosts (and fairies!), and it is entirely possible that we do live in a Platonic universe that is filled with ghosts and fairies. There would be an actual arc of justice in a Platonic universe, because of physics’ influence on nature and consciousness, disposing nature and consciousness toward Platonic ideals.

But we still don’t know.

Remember Madras?

I can’t remember what made me think about Madras shirts last week. It might have been because we were having uncommonly hot weather for early spring, and that started me thinking about whether I needed new warm-weather shirts. I’ve made a bad habit of buying Harris tweed jackets on eBay, so of course I went on eBay and searched for Madras shirts.

There were quite a few. Most of them seemed to have been made by Ralph Lauren. They were surprisingly inexpensive, which made me think that, unlike well made Harris tweed jackets, which can be pretty dear, nobody wants Madras shirts anymore.

Well, too bad for them, then, because I’ll wear them. When I was in junior high school (think 1963), Madras shirts were a major thing and a status symbol. I don’t think I had one until high school, when I bought a Madras shirt with my own money, which I had earned from my weekend job as a newspaper copy boy. It was mostly yellow, as I recall, with a lot of narrow deep red lines, and maybe some blue or green.

The shirt I’m wearing in the photo actually is 100 percent linen, which makes me think that it’s not authentic made-in-India Madras. Madras was always made from cotton, as far as I know. But it seems that the history of Madras is as long as the history of Harris tweed. Originally, Madras cloth was loomed by hand, by workers in India. Unsurprisingly, there also is some sort of British colonial connection, including a particular connection with Scotland.

Go figure. But my new thinking is that Madras shirts are to hot weather as Harris tweed jackets are to cold weather. And suddenly I’m afraid that I’m at risk of starting a collection. They are outrageously comfortable, though, and much cheaper on eBay than any decent shirt bought new.

The Taste of Things


Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel

I have some complaints about the plot of “The Taste of Things,” but the plot really isn’t the point. The point is the food and what happens in the kitchen and at the table. The amazingly beautiful food in this film makes me feel like a complete slob in the kitchen.

Did anyone really cook and eat like that in the 19th Century? Was anyone in the 19th Century really that far ahead of us in presentation? I tend to doubt it. But the point, I think, has to do with the deep roots of high cuisine, what we owe to the French, and the importance of having a garden just outside the kitchen door.

This film was released in U.S. theaters earlier this year. It’s now available for rent or purchase on Apple TV and Amazon Prime. I actually bought it rather than renting it. There are a great many things happening in the kitchen that move a little too fast to properly study. I’ll want to review the kitchen work. The film opens with Juliette Binoche in the garden harvesting celeriac. The kitchen work moved too fast for me to see whether the celeriac reappears in the kitchen, but, if it does, I’m very curious about celeriac.

Sooner or later you’re going to be asked whether you’ve seen this film. You want to be able to say yes.