Los Galeones

There is no doubt in my mind that the Spanish imported the technology for building their galleons from Portugal.

By 1492, when the Nina, Pinta, and the flagship Santa Maria sailed for the Indies, the caravels of the Perfect Prince had already rounded the Cape of Good Hope—the tip of southern Africa—and reached the Terra Nova do Bacalhau, the New(found)Land of Cod.

Cargoes of gold and slaves were coming into Lisbon from West Africa, and the small, darting caravels that could tack into narrow estuaries were gradually replaced by massive naus—ponderous merchantmen that could scale the age of exploration into gold and silver.

By the mid-nineties of the XV^th century Spain too was building an overseas empire. By 1492, Granada, the last bastion of the Caliphate, had been conquered from the Moors by the Catholic Kings, and the great hoax of Columbus—the discovery of the Indies—set the scene for a series of westbound expeditions.

As soon as the Treaty of Tordesillas was signed on June 7^th, 1494 and blessed by the Borgia pope, the stage was set for Spanish exploration.

The drive east from Badajoz, Spain, takes you down the N-430, a sleepy national road. On a Sunday afternoon it’s deserted, proverbially ‘la calle donde no pasa nada.’ I watched the needle climb to a hundred miles an hour, with only the olive groves and the occasional solitary eagle for company.

I slowed as I approached a pueblo—the name of the village was Hernán Cortés.

Wow.

I later found out your man was born in Medellín, about six miles south.

On the 13^th of August 1527, four hundred ninety-six years ago today, the native Mexican tribe of Montezuma surrendered to Hernán Cortés.

The eponymous pueblo flashes past in a heartbeat, but I get to thinking how the illiterate peasants of flat and empty Extremadura found their way to Mexico, and the ravages that ensued.

As soon as the Aztecs were conquered, the silver and gold of the Americas was ripe for the greed of the conquistadores. This led to the Carrera de Indias—ironically, from 1495, when Vasco da Gama arrived in India, the Portuguese also had the Carreira das Índias—but this one sailed to the correct indies.

The Spanish carrera resulted in over seven hundred shipwrecks. Since the galleons were now crewed by over five hundred people, the overall death toll rises to hundreds of thousands.

Of the wrecks, the following breakdown, if you excuse the pun, was compiled for one hundred fifty losses.

Most of the sinkings took place in the 16^th and 18^th centuries, and almost all (98%) were due to weather. The Spanish avoided sailing in August due to the hurricane season, but nonetheless the galleons were sunk by hurricanes (70%) and Atlantic storms (30%).

Eighteen percent of the ships that sank carried silver, fifteen percent were loaded with gold bullion. Out of the 150 vessels analyzed, only two quicksilver azogueros were lost.

The history of the Spanish conquest of Latin America is one of greed, torture, and murder. The marks that Spanish rule left on the indigenous populations persist to this day.

Of all the Spanish names associated with conquest, there are two that stand out for the worst reasons.

Hernando Cortés and Francisco Pizarro.

They were second cousins.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

The Mine

When the boat left the dock, the sun was already burning my skin.

It disguised its menace by making the early morning light dance on the swell, conspiring with the breeze to present us with the perfect Mediterranean sunrise.

By the time we got back to port it was half past four.

In Spain, that’s called lunchtime.

As I watched the round table get busy with jamon, puntillitas, and beers, I nursed my wine, my body grateful for the ham—the sweet salt replenished what I’d lost during my day at sea.

As the conversation erupted in rapid-fire Andalusian, waiting for the inevitable paella to arrive, my eyes closed briefly and my mind wandered back to the mine.

The minute I’d read about it on Sunday night, I knew I’d have to go.

What led me there was a German family called the Fuggers. The name would have been enough to get me going, but the fact I was reading about sixteenth century bankers from Augsburg while sipping tinto in a seventeenth century Castilian monastery courtyard made the whole thing almost mystical.

The Fuggers—the locals struggled with the name and hispanicized it to something even better, Los Fúcares—got themselves a mine.

They did it in the mid-sixteen-hundreds through a rental contract with Philip IV of Castile, who decided to place the exploitation of the mine in private hands.

But the story of the mine comes from the times of the ancient Greek geographer Strabo, who traveled the known world during the Pax Romana and described what he saw in seventeen volumes. And the mine is described by Pliny the Elder, who writes about the cinnabar extracted there—the red ore prized by Roman artists.

Also known as Vermilion, it is in fact mercury sulfide.

The Arabs mined mercury there during the Caliphate, and christened (sorry) it, المعدن—al-maʿdin, or The Mine.

Almadén, or Almadén del Azogue—which means mercury in Arabic—isn’t just a mercury mine.

It’s the biggest in the world—a third of the mercury mined on Planet Earth came from there—two hundred fifty thousand metric tons.

It’s possible to descend fifty meters down the seven hundred meter shaft, but not on Mondays—all museums in Spain are closed. Luckily, I had a drone.

Alfonso VII of Spain took Almadén back from the Moors in 1151, and ceded it to the military order of Calatrava—over the next one and a half centuries the mine expanded, with exploitation in private hands.

But it was when the Spanish discovered gold and silver in the New World that quicksilver became most sought after. Mercury forms an amalgam with gold, which allows the precious metal to be taken from ore. The mercury is then distilled by heating—anyone who inhales the vapor will suffer severe neurological damage.

The mercury was transported by a special fleet of forty-six azogue galleons—the vessels were called azogueros—and the demand soared.

Work at the mine was terrible—to keep operations going, the King of Spain and the Fuggers turned to convict labor—when prisoners were sentenced to hard labor, their worst nightmares were the mercury mines at Al Madin, followed by the naval arsenal in Cartagena.

Living and working conditions were appalling and mercury poisoning was rife. In 1566, 30 convicts were sent to the mine—by 1623, that number had grown to eighty, with a matching quota of slaves.

A prison was built to hold the workers.

The Fuggers were compelled to build an infirmary and a pharmacy to tend to sick.

In the mid-eighteenth century a hospital was built.

I thought about the immense suffering the small town of Almaden had witnessed over the centuries—gypsies were systematically sentenced to mine labor for no good reason—vagrancy, or even the use of a convoluted language called jerinzonza, were enough for a ten-year stint.

On the drive south to the coast, my head was filled with what I had witnessed—twenty-three centuries of history, untold pain, and the greed and cruelty of men.

The chatter of my seafaring companions broke into my thoughts—convivial words fueled by simple lives—as long as health, appetite, and pay held up, these men would be happy.

The Spanish fishermen had been working through the cervezas. One of them was scraping the bottom of the paella dish, mining for the elusive socarrat. I held out my plate. Your man was telling a chiste—they’d been discussing professions—and vacations.

“Teaching, now that’s a great job, “Pablo said. “You know the two best reasons for being a Maestro?”

He gave the table a broad grin.

Pues… July and August.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

Animalia

Every language in the world surely contains references to animals—I don’t just mean names, but aphorisms.

As soon as I wrote the first sentence of this article, I wondered how many languages there are on this earth—yes, I know, lots.

The CIA world factbook helps with that—part of the magic of America is that the federal government, and therefore the US taxpayer, pays to collect and make available this kind of information for universal benefit. The book provides data for 240 countries—Nepal alone has 123 languages.

As you might expect, Europe and North America have only a few languages per country, but have a look at other parts of the world.

Language fascinates me—it’s a key distinction between Homo sapiens and his next of kin. My search took me to Ethnologue, which reports there are 7168 living languages at present.

Pause for a moment, dear reader, and consider how amazing our species is. The drive for communication is strong within us (young Skywalker), to the extent that we developed a bunch of these languages independently, looking for ways to tell each other ‘I love you’, ask for help or food, tell a story to a child, or preserve a family memory.

I vacillate when it comes to religion, and yet I feel that Darwinian evolution and her genetic offspring cannot explain the prodigious gap between man and beast.

That word—beast—is a general one, and many languages expand it into a host of other animals. I presume some languages are historically devoid of words for animals that don’t exist in their region—the Guaymi language, spoken in Panama, is unlikely to have a word for polar bear or penguin.

In English, bream is taken to mean a whole host of different species, including tilapia—the word is associated with the shape. In Portuguese, bream can be expanded into pargo, sargo, dourada, besugo, and salema, to name a few.

When it comes to phrases, our use of animalia is punitive: to live a dog’s life; to die like a dog; food unfit for a dog; dog’s breakfast; stupid cow; stupid donkey; dirty pig; catty; copycat, skitty kitty, dirty rat; chickenshit; chickening out; lazy sloth; it’s a fishy business.

Animal terms directed at women are particularly vicious: she’s a dog, she’s a bitch—radically different meanings—or in recent infamous memory, pussy, courtesy of the teflon orangutan. Dirty cow, face like a horse…

As has happened with race and gender, there is an embryonic pet-woke movement banning such expressions from conversation—a canine class action suit entitled ‘deemed as derogatory to dogs’ may soon be upon us.

The use of animal insults is part of a group of offenses termed speciesism. You are speciesist—akin to racist, sexist, or misogynist—if you value one species more than another, for instance if you consider a dog as a pet and a rat as a pest.

Although I’m surprised and upset by the number of animal insults—which not only reflect our dislike, or arrogance towards other species but our disrespect for ourselves—I can’t take it to the woke level of expunging words and aphorisms from the language.

In any case, it wouldn’t work—I’m a strong believer in the immutability of human nature.

Even worse, I’m a wokeist.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

Girls, Girls, Girls

Two of the weirdest guys in the world are at each other’s throats.

Like a couple of catty teens in the schoolyard scratching over a stolen boyfriend, they’re fighting about a messaging app which propagates vacuous piffle—so ordinary people can fill up their hours with trivial inconsequence while waiting for the cancer to come calling.

The concept of the generation gap was made popular in the 1960s, driven by seismic shifts in music and fashion—a radical culture change, in fact, that led many to believe that war could become a thing of the past.

Lennon sang ‘Love is all you need’ and the world believed him.

Twitter—like break dance or rap—was a generation gap event for me. I couldn’t—can’t—understand why anyone would spend time there, and I found—find—the whole ecosystem of likes and retweets tedious and glib.

The humble—and not so humble—brag of celebrities and wannabees falls silent when the serious pain of life hits. Misfortune, broken relationships, serious illness, death… these human conditions occur to us all in one form or another, and that’s when we become quiet—only fools broadcast personal drama to an invisible coterie.

But Musk—number one in our double cast of weirdos—put four billion dollars into Twitter for ten percent of the total forty-four billion paid. In a world of hunger, migration, and war, that price classifies as an obscenity.

His strategy to build the company included firing much of the staff. In November 2022, CNN announced half of the 7500 personnel would go. By February 2023, the Guardian wrote that 200 additional staff were dismissed, out of the remaining 2000, and the most recent data suggests eighty percent of the 7500 have gone.

Elon Musk tweeted—or perhaps twitted—that he apologized for “firing these geniuses…Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.”

The geniuses now appear to have paid him back in kind; Meta—the artist formally known as Facebook—launched its Threads platform last week.

Zuckerberg’s company already owns WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, and thereby benefits from cross-platform leverage.

The next few weeks will show what the stock market makes of all this—given the uptake of Threads, Sugarmountain, the other strangeling of the double act, is set to blossom, but Meta’s cross-platform clout begins to hypnotize the regulator when it comes to antitrust actions, and Twitter is suing for IP violation.

A final consideration is that Threads might add three billion to Meta’s bottom line—a juicy number, but is it significant in a total revenue of 116 billion?

Twitter, on the other hand, with no cross-platform claims, would make an excellent short, but Musk had the good sense to delist it before serial-killing it.

Maybe both platforms will thrive—folks are addicted to messaging apps, with something for everyone, including Telegram and Signal for the radical fraternity.

One thing’s for sure—like AI, these platforms have profoundly changed the way we live, and their potential to affect politics and change election results is huge—that’s why totalitarian countries shut down the net at the first sign of trouble.

Map of internet shutdowns in 2020, showing the usual Middle Eastern and African suspects—India wins the gold medal (image courtesy of Al Jazeera).

The effect on our lives can be more local, yet no less insidious. In a recent case in Canada, a farmer was taken to court for reneging on a deal to sell eighty-seven tons of flax at a fixed price to a grain dealer.

The judge ruled the farmer had contractually agreed to the sale, based on a WhatsApp exchange. The buyer sent a signed contract and the farmer replied to the message in the clearest possible way.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

A Walk in the Park

But this is no ordinary walk.

And this is no ordinary park.

The park in question is Xerox PARC—the Palo Alto Research Center.

The name ‘palo alto’ means tall stick—it’s the unimaginative name the Spanish explorers found for the redwoods of northern California, but for decades it’s been associated with high tech—like every other big thing, computing has a history, and plenty of it was written here.

In 1970, the chief scientist of Xerox, Jack Goldman, created a kind of spin-off from the mothership—but kept it firmly in orbit.

PARC is now an independent company, but as part of Xerox its astounding group of innovators changed the world—I know, that sounds strong, but this is what the world looked like in the sixties…

You, dear reader, are doing me the kindness of spending some time at my weekend retreat—perhaps a little earlier you were on Facebook or Twitter, maybe Instagram or Telegram.

Computers are so ingrained in our lives that we can’t untangle the web—so it’s fair to say computing changed the world back then—jobs were lost, jobs were created, Jobs was found, and a deep moat was dug between those who have digital access and those who don’t.

You do, or you wouldn’t be here—but only last week I saw a guy staring at a QR code with great perplexity. Since he was holding a smartphone, I showed him how to turn that into information—but after two years of pandemic QR codes staring at you everywhere, digital literacy still seems some way off.

Computing is always about ones and zeroes—I suspect saying that only makes it worse for folks to picture how bits (ones and zeroes) can end up flying rocket ships.

A QR code, like the four I always show at the end of my articles—soon to be five when The Hourglass gets done—always has those three squares on the corners. Like the pillars of a house, they tell your cellphone camera where things start and finish. The actual magic begins at the bottom-right corner—your camera tells a computer (aka your phone) how much data to read—just as if you were reading it in English, as you are on this page.

Xerox PARC is very much the start of it all, including the mouse—just a sanding block at the time—invented by Doug Engelbart at SRI and shortly after finding a home in PARC’s GUI (gooey), or Graphical User Interface.

I registered for the Computer History Museum and this is what they gave me—there’s a joke about three economists in the same vein—those who can count, and those who can’t.

Welcome to the CHM family, where we know there are 10 (1-0) types of people in this world. Those who understand binary and those who don’t.

That got me smiling, but more importantly, the CHM is a world of discovery in computer science. The people at PARC were exceptional—not just for their intelligence, but also their originality. An initial group asked Xerox for a computer called PDP-10, made by the long-defunct DEC, or Digital Equipment Corporation.

The mothership denied the request because Xerox had recently bought a DEC competitor called SDS. The PARC engineers shrugged and built a PDP-10 clone. Human-machine interaction and the idea of a networked computer system were at the heart of PARC—folks like Robert Metcalfe and Ivan Sutherland left huge legacies, including the first ever computer graphics program, called Sketchpad.

PARC also invented the laser printer, as well as an architecture to allow any computer to print on any printer, by defining a format that sits in the middle of the two and mediates—that’s the concept behind Adobe’s postcript. Oh, and PARC was doing AI in 1984.

Through the seventies and eighties, PARC made lots of products, its scientists paraded them at IEEE (eye-triple-e) conferences and its innovations stunned the world.

Well, to be specific, a stunned world reviewed the products, marveled at them, and promptly stole them.

PARC made lots of products, but somehow never managed to bring them to market. There was only one thing PARC didn’t know how to make.

Money.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

Skywars

Two days ago I was flying a drone at night—my favorite time, probably Zelensky’s also—and the machine, propeller lights winking in the distance, seemed to be making its getaway.

Then I checked my phone and identified the drone hovering above my house, some one hundred meters up.

The other object, now only dimly visible, was a plane.

The word drone is pejorative, implying a creature with no mind of its own—a bot. But just as robots are now acquiring a mind of their own (Ai Ai, Sir!), drones now do a lot of independent thinking—or at least their software does.

This includes very sophisticated collision avoidance—which I intend to disable shortly on my new machine in order to enter confined spaces—and the capacity to return home autonomously when things go wrong.

And they do go wrong—the remote control might fail to detect the vehicle, or in a more kinetic environment, might get jammed. Momma knows the little bird has flown, but the fledgling must also know how to get back home.

Or fuel may be low—the drone knows it won’t make it back, so it heads for the nest.

I guess all this makes it an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, or UAV, and when we use the word ‘drone’ it now indicates a higher being, particularly when coupled to AI—soon they’ll be rebranded AIAV or just IAV.

Even since Icarus glued on a pair of wings and flew—only to crash to his death when the sun melted the beeswax—man has wanted to be freed of the earth.

It’s no surprise, then, that UAVs were seen as a trampoline to this ambition—just make them a bit bigger and put in a human payload.

A bunch of companies are making and selling these right now—prices are 100k or north—an order of magnitude more than a car.

But never fear—the Chinese are coming.

There’s a certain irony that for war we wanted them unmanned, and for peace we prefer them manned—drones, that is, not Chinese.

By 2040, our urban landscapes will include small personal craft flying through the skies—and new regulation on airborne vehicles, driving permits, speed limits, new highway (excuse the pun) code, and much more.

In the meantime, UAVs are deployed on military missions the world over, whether surveying, spying, or striking.

The Ukraine war has shown us Turkish drones, Iranian drones—countries best known for coffee and pistachio nuts are in the drone biz? Who knew. But here’s the thing—drones are a poor man’s toy.

This is the kind of airframe flying around occupied areas of the Ukraine—sexy it ain’t.

But that doesn’t stop it from dropping bombs on unsuspecting Russians.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

On the Road

I turned up the radio as I drove north and listened to the soft Irish brogue.

Yer man was reviewing the news, and his first selection was an item about Japan—orientals love a bit of mask-wearing at the best of times, but this was so ingrained during the pandemic that people are now frequenting smiling classes at fifty-five bucks an hour—certainly enough to wipe the smile off my face.

I love Irish radio, just as I love Guinness and oysters, and pretty much everything about the country—or rather the island.

Where else could you see a patron bursting into the pub, loudly proclaiming, “How’s the craic!” while staring up at an Irishman from another life doing a Lionel.

A couple of convicted drinkers quite literally dancing on the ceiling.

A few years ago, I was in the Emerald Isle with a Scandinavian friend who was very taken by the expression—craic being of course pronounced crack—in his delight, he approached a young lady and solemnly inquired, “How’s your crack?”

On the highway, I discovered the car drove itself if I took both hands off the wheel—very cool. After a while, it told me that the self-drive would turn off shortly—grab the wheel. I ignored it for a couple of miles until another sign came up to tell me the vehicle would now proceed to stop on its own. As it slowed, the emergency flashers came on and I decided to heed the advice—I’m not keen on cars that have a mind of their own.

The radio now had a discussion panel—they were talking about a guy called Bayne who I’d never heard of. Quite fond of the bottle, it seemed. They talked about that, about his writing, and about his death.

He was a man of aphorisms, who once said, “I drink to make people interesting.” Later, I found out he was called Brendan Behan—who once described himself as ‘a drinker with a writing problem’ and I also discovered he’d been a member of the IRA and was an exceptionally good writer.

And that his uncle Peadar (Peter) Kearney wrote the Irish national anthem, and that he hung around in New York in the early sixties with Bob Dylan, and that Dylan’s classic ‘With God On Our Side’ was ‘borrowed’ from Brendan’s brother Dominic—who himself took it from an old Irish classic, ‘The Merry Month of May.’

Dominic later questioned the provenance of Dylan’s body of work in general—since I am intimately familiar with Uncle Bob’s discography, I beg to disagree.

Toward the end of my trip, I found myself in Newtownards, a small town east of Belfast. The town is at the head of Strangford Lough, a beautiful part of the world, but I hadn’t come for the scenery. I was on a mission to Conway Square—not to visit the town hall, but to view the statue of the legendary Paddy Mayne.

One of the founders of the British SAS, probably as important as David Stirling—certainly an order of magnitude crazier.

Like most Irish—in this case from the North, and a loyalist, the opposite of Behan—he never got his just recognition. He died a colonel, not from wounds in battle but in a car crash on a local road after a night’s drinking.

Mayne’s story is celebrated in Ben MacIntyre’s book Rogue Heroes—the wartime SAS was detested by Hitler, who gave orders that all war protocol, including the Geneva Convention, was to be ignored, and these men should be shot on sight.

Many were, but the cost to the Nazis was immense.

And Mayne was detested by the British establishment, which he treated with considerable disregard.

In different ways, Mayne and Behan—the names rhyme—embody the wonder and spirit of the island of Ireland. A place of mysticism, struggle, hilarity, kindness, hope, and fate.

Ireland is unique, and it’s the Irish that make it so.

On my way to the airport, the bus driver explained he had an apartment in southwest Portugal. “I think we’re very alike, the Irish and the Portuguese.”

I smiled. “Yes, I’ve thought so for years. Nice people, good craic, nasty neighbors.”

Yer man burst out laughing.

That’s the thing—you can occupy Ireland, and it has a history of it.

But you can’t conquer it.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

A Night at the Opera

The Ukraine war—or special military operation, if you ask the Kremlin—is in its second year, with the Ukrainian army now revealing that the spring offensive is imminent.

Spring in that part of the world is somewhat later than the ides of March—the temperature in Moscow will still go down to single digits today—but the next weeks will be interesting, to say the least.

The Russian invasion has been a disaster by any standard—only Putin and his henchmen claim otherwise—but the most fascinating aspect of the Russian ‘special operation’ has been the use of a private army, run by Yevgeny Prigozhin, known as Putin’s chef.

The Wagner group, possibly named after the military call sign of its founder, Dmitriy Valeryevich Utkin, brings to mind the Ride of the Valkyries, of Apocalypse Now fame, and the name of Hitler’s favorite composer—how’s that for pedigree?

Utkin himself is a treasure trove of irony—he was born in the Ukraine and is a Nazi sympathizer—wonderful in a context where the Russian narrative is that the special operation in his country of birth is being conducted to eliminate Ukrainian fascisti, or Фашисты.

As an aside, if you type an Italian or German word into Google, you mainly get results in your own language—in English if you use an Anglo-Saxon version of the search engine—but if you paste the Cyrillic above, you only get Cyrillic results. The same applies to Chinese, but for Japanese, Thai, and other alphabets, less so.

Wagner has been described as a mercenary organization, but that’s incorrect—it is effectively a despot’s private army, much like private armies that have existed since the days of Xenophon. For millennia, prisoners have exchanged their jail sentence for hardship in the king’s service.

But Wagner made a name for themselves both for fighting Russia’s proxy wars with (im)plausible Kremlin deniability and through atrocities committed in the field.

A recent UN report details the massacre of five hundred people in Mali, where Wagner is active. The Russians were choppered in and, together with the Malian army, rounded up the locals—women were raped and extra-judicial execution followed.

Wagner is active in various parts of sub-Saharan Africa, stepping up to help regimes struggling with armed opposition, variously described as terrorists, insurgents, or freedom fighters—take your pick. This Russian support, replacing what Western powers once did, along with preferential grain exports and other aid, is straight out of the Soviet playbook.

The other disruptive element of the Ukraine war are the drones.

From the start of the war, President Zelensky has been pushing for air power at fever-pitch, knowing that only by opposing Russia’s control of the skies was it possible to stop the incessant bombardments—without the air, power stations and hospitals could be destroyed, civilians could be terrorized… all pages out of the Soviet manuals and the Wagner aria.

Zelensky begged. NATO and its member states, in particular the USA, demurred.

The Ukrainians set up a domestic drone industry and the results have been wildly successful. Drones are bringing the pain back to Moscow and twisting the knife—upmarket Muscovites for whom this was a television war woke up recently to the sound of UUAVs (the first U is mine) buzzing Leninsky Prospekt.

An Ukranian engineer at a secret drone factory was asked this week about the range of the planes coming out of his factory and their ability to strike the invaders. He nodded with a wry smile.

“Moscow is only seven hundred and fifty kilometers away.”

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

C’est Chaud

Joseph Fourier, a giant of mathematics and physics, first described the concept in his book ‘Théorie analytique de la chaleur‘—Analytical Theory of Heat.

Fourier, who was a contemporary of Napoleon, published his book in 1822, just over two centuries ago, and opened the door to meteorology, oceanography, earth sciences, environmental sciences…

The sun is our primary source of heat, and without it no life could exist on our planet. However, if the earth’s temperature depended only on the sun, our planet would have a temperature around thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, or zero centigrade. Mars, for instance, has a surface temperature of -85 ^oF—permafrost.

Temperature on the surface of the planets in our solar system. Earth is the only one where water can exist in a liquid state and a carbon-based biosphere can survive (diagram from NASA).

Uncle Joseph concluded that our atmosphere was responsible for retaining heat and making this place livable—in other words, he discovered the greenhouse effect.

Although carbon emissions—associated with carbon dioxide—are what you hear about on the news, water is the most important greenhouse gas; the evaporation of water and the formation of clouds, and the atmospheric gases, together constitute our atmosphere.

When I was growing up, I wondered why there was snow on the mountains, but rivers and forests down below. Surely, the temperature increased as you went up, as you got closer to the sun? The fact there is snow on the mountaintops, i.e. closer to the sun, was enough for me to understand something else was going on. But what?

Fourier’s greenhouse—that’s what.

Like our own bodies, the atmosphere is a finely balanced, constantly changing system—it works like a pendulum: the more you swing it out, the quicker it comes back—in biology, that’s called homeostasis, from the Greek words ‘same’ and steady’.

The two gases that mainly make up the atmosphere, nitrogen (78%) and oxygen (21%), are not greenhouse gases—these are in the 0.1% of ‘other gases’: in order of importance, water vapor (clouds), carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone—four of these contain oxygen, and one contains nitrogen.

So the earth’s heat budget depends on a small part of the atmosphere—if the air we breathe was largely made up of greenhouse gases, we would all suffocate, which would quickly resolve climate change.

The origin of the big five gases—there’s a sixth called chlorofluorocarbon, or CFC, but since it also destroys the ozone layer, it gets weird—is diverse: water vapor is universal, the excess CO₂ comes mainly from fossil fuels, methane from cattle farts, and nitrous oxide from fertilizers.

• When you have a diversity of causes, it’s difficult to apportion blame and settle on solutions.
• When a problem is global and the change is not immediately obvious on the street, people will not change their ways.
• When the contributions required are unequal, particularly in light of history—European and North American deforestation, or industrial development in the West—governments will not agree.

Finally, the signal to noise ratio of climate change is very low. This allows politicians, industry, and deniers to have a field day by confusing weather and climate.

Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

Believe It Or Bot

Ed Sheeran was found not guilty of plagiarism, after a total waste of tax-payer money.

I’m very happy for him—it’s bad enough he bears a resemblance to Boris Johnson. Speaking of which, diluted in the sophomoric madness of the coronation, last week also marks Tory trouncing Thursday—Sunak’s conservatives lost 48 councils and over one thousand councilors—much of the blame for that should be laid at Boris’s door.

In the midst of these fait divers, the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence is my major concern at present, as we whistle past the graveyard on Horse Guards Parade.

This seismic paradigm shift is cruising through the human race, most of whom are either scrabbling for their next meal or their next Instagram post.

I find it so worrying—and so relevant to today’s society—that as I make my final revisions to The Hourglass in the next couple of months I will work some AI into the book, which already addresses topics like self-driving vehicles and Deep Fakes. The latter have become so mainstream that you can go online and swap your face into your favorite video.

Humans struggle to deal with anything non-linear, from falling in love to coping with death—the internet in general, and AI in particular, is no exception.

Internet servers around the world. The US has a stunning 149,313,079 machines (Google probably owns half of them)—that’s one computer for every two people. China, a putative rival, has only 1,100,841 machines—one for every 1400 people.

To understand how quickly AI can—and will—surge, a few stats about the internet are useful. Domain registration has boomed in the last couple of years—during the pandemic, the curve is vertical. At present, there are over six hundred million registered domains—at an average cost of thirty bucks per year, that’s twenty billion dollars of annual revenue.

AI would not be possible without the internet—as data folks are fond of saying, the only thing better than data is more data.

We recognize that growth in AI has been slow—painfully slow—over the last decades, but what we don’t talk about is that the explosive growth we see now is closely linked to the explosion of internet infrastructure, use, social media, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The Large Language Model (LLM) neural networks that form the basis of ChatGPT and its various siblings emerged in 2018, very much a consequence of the availability of “large quantities of unlabeled text”, used to define “many parameters (typically billions of weights or more)”. In other words, the internet.

I asked ChatGPT about Ed Sheeran.

is the song Thinking Out Loud a copy of Let’s Get It On (ChatGPT is like putonghua, it doesn’t need punctuation).

There have been accusations that the song “Thinking Out Loud” by Ed Sheeran has similarities to “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye. In 2016, Ed Sheeran was sued for copyright infringement by the estate of Ed Townsend, who co-wrote “Let’s Get It On” with Marvin Gaye, and the case was settled out of court.

While the similarities between the two songs have been noted, it is ultimately up to a court to determine whether there was any unlawful copying or infringement of copyright. The settlement of the lawsuit suggests that there may have been some basis to the claims, but it is not a definitive conclusion.

In any case, it is not uncommon for songs to share similarities or be inspired by previous works. Music is a constantly evolving art form, and it is often the case that elements of earlier songs are incorporated into new compositions.

Jeepers (for it is he) gave me a crappy, plain-vanilla answer—not a fucking opinion!

But worse than that, the first paragraph correctly states the lawsuit was filed in 2016 but then ‘informs’ us it was settled out of court. Bollocks. And the second ends with ‘The settlement of the lawsuit suggests there may have been some basis to the claims…”

I can find no evidence of such a settlement, and the case concluded last week would suggest the matter was resolved in court.

In other words, Jeepers is a lyin’ lil’ bot. But we humans are educated to give the benefit of the doubt. So I asked old Jeeps.

“As an artificial intelligence language model, I am not capable of lying or telling the truth.”

Ah, now I like him, dis bot’s gittin’ phil-o-sophy. The reply is dangerously close to the paradox made famous by Epiminedes the Cretan: All Cretans Are liars. I think Jeepers is becoming Jeepistotle.

Some of the AI lies are extremely troublesome. This one was reported in the Washington Post.

One night last week, the law professor Jonathan Turley got a troubling email. As part of a research study, a fellow lawyer in California had asked the AI chatbot ChatGPT to generate a list of legal scholars who had sexually harassed someone. Turley’s name was on the list.

The chatbot, created by OpenAI, said Turley had made sexually suggestive comments and attempted to touch a student while on a class trip to Alaska, citing a March 2018 article in The Washington Post as the source of the information. The problem: No such article existed. There had never been a class trip to Alaska. And Turley said he’d never been accused of harassing a student.

My concern about AI rocketed when I heard an eminent AI researcher talk about the dangers of all this—resulting in an open letter signed by many concerned humans—well, 27565, so not that many.

Actually, you can add one to that, Peter Wibaux just signed up. I enjoy the irony of fighting AI with an artificial human: AH versus AI.

Will you join the fun?

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones