In an effort to educate myself, I am reading The Oxford Book of Essays, chosen and edited by John Gross. [copies for sale here] There’s 142 of the blighters, so it will take me all year. To make this “stick” I am going to blog each essay. This essay is online Who was the author:... Continue Reading →
Book review: “Curse the Day” by Jude (Judith) O’Reilly – fun ludicrous thriller
I am going to write a review of every book I read this year. O'Reilly, J. 2020. Curse the Day. London: Head of Zeus. pp414 Highly entertaining, utterly ludicrous military thriller with an indestructible/needs no sleep/has bullet in brain superhero called Michael North (it’s always two syllable forename, one syllable surname, no?) This is the... Continue Reading →
Film Reviews: The Ipcress File (1965) and Children of Men (2006)
I own a bunch of DVDs, bought in charity shops, that I have never got round to watching. Well, life is short and who knows how long it lasts (it's later than you think etc etc), so I am going to watch and review (briefly) the lot. No idea how long this will take, because,... Continue Reading →
Richard II: Bard to the Bone #18
Hmm, read this back at the beginning of August, only now putting up. And I have another 8 history plays to do the same with, alongside reading a wonderful Atheistmas present - "The Great White Bard," which I will be reading and blogging. You'd think I would know about striking while the irony is hot...... Continue Reading →
The ominous parallels – AI and Carbon Capture and Storage
Should probably turn this into some think piece for some paywalled academic journal that nobody reads. Citations are the currency blah bah. In the meantime - it occurred to me today as I shlepped into town (a useful 15 minute walk) that there are some interesting (ymmv) parallels between "Artificial Intelligence" and "carbon capture and... Continue Reading →
The epistemological blizzard has crossed the threshold, and it’s overturned the order of the soul
The title is a reference to this typically-cheerful Leonard Cohen number from 1992. Basically, humans have always (1) struggled to make sense of a cruel and complicated world. Religion did okay for us - especially when it was the (Greek) gods - a bunch of powerful petulant teenagers (at best), toying with the humans: a... Continue Reading →
LLMs will lead to heart-ache, confusion and worse.
I was reading John Michael Greer on “cognitive collapse” and this leapt out at me. “Since they’re not intelligent—LLMs, that is—they lack the capacity to check their output against the real world, which leaves them vulnerable to model collapse: the process by which the internal model of reality programmed into them drifts disastrously away from... Continue Reading →
We are terrible at meetings – all kinds
Over the last month I've collected yet more examples of just how terrible "we" are at meetings (online, in meatspace, hybrid, whatever). I did not need these, or go looking for them. But there they were.... By "we" I do not just mean social movement "activists" looking to create momentum behind a campaign - my... Continue Reading →
October 31st, 1930 – “Bulb Planting” (Harold Nicholson 3/37)
Date of transmission:October 31st 1930TitleBulb PlantingContext/descriptionIt's October, and "Winter is Coming" - back when the UK had proper winters (snow and stuff)Words I didn’t know or ya don’t see much anymore:Stuff I looked up:Boticelli's PrimaveraBest sentences:"All too well do we know that those bulbs will come up the next year garish as the foreground of... Continue Reading →
Mobile phones as id portals – affordances affording fascism…
I was, to my wife's exasperation, a (very) late adopter of mobile phone technology; I have luddite tendencies, after all. Anyway, this isn't about me (it turns out some things aren't! Who knew). This is about how we think about mobiles. They are sold as wonderboxes that have the world's knowledge at our fingertips. As... Continue Reading →
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