Still life with dumb phone

By: | November 18, 2019

Last summer my iPhone went kaput, the victim of a bass-fishing accident and a case that proved to be, upon close review of fine print, water-resistant rather than water-proof. The distinction was not semantic.  When the screen turned fuzzy red plaid, a color and pattern better suited to a kilt than to liquid crystal, I knew it was over. I was back on the cellular market.

Truth be told, the drowning felt less like a tragedy than it did an intervention. My iPhone had been a saboteur, the seditious Wormtongue to my weak-willed Theoden: My attention span had contracted, my sleep hygiene had deteriorated, and my propensity for blithely stumbling into traffic had become an existential threat. I’d developed junkie-like behaviors, excusing myself at parties to take a quick bathroom hit of Facebook or Gmail. Worst of all was Twitter’s poisonous intravenous drip. One quick injection of its negativity — on line at the bakery, between innings at a baseball game — was enough to induce a lingering state of distracted dread.

Thus it was with considerable relief that I walked into a Verizon store and asked the salesman to show me his dumbest phone. He raised an eyebrow and led me to a remote corner, far from the iPhones and Galaxies and Droids. Three clunky flip phones stood on plastic stands, open at their hinges like steamed clams. I settled on an LG Exalt LTE flippie, a slim gray briquette the size and feel of a deck of cards. So long, Youtube. Fare thee well, Amazon. Like Nirvana and Clapton before me, I would reach new heights by going unplugged.

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New Person of LWON

By: | November 18, 2019

We are pleased to welcome Ben Goldfarb to our hallowed halls, where he will join Erik Vance and Richard Panek in being Very Tall, and also Very Erudite. You may know Ben for his incredible writing about fish, the ocean, and all manner of wildlife topics. If not, then you certainly know him for his award-amassing beaver expertise. And if not even that, we have no doubt that you will soon know him for his writing on road ecology. Or even just his writing in this, his first post as an official Person of LWON.

AI takes a village

By: | November 15, 2019

Are you afraid of the coming AI overlords? Then you’ve probably been sold an exaggerated narrative. Beth Singler, a Cambridge University anthropologist who tires of gratuitous media use of the Terminator pictures, thinks these kinds of representations have skewed our ideas of what AI is capable of.

So what is AI really capable of? For an excellent insight into that, I direct your attention to an insight-packed interview with Janelle Shane at IEEE Spectrum magazine. Shane, a neural network trainer (in the same way people are lion or elephant trainers), runs the AI Weirdness blog, which she began in 2016. There she teaches machine learning algorithms to do weird tricks like come up with their own hallucinatory takes on ice cream flavors, paint colors, and recipes whose instructions include “add creamed meat”. 

Spectrum: You say in [your new] book that you can learn a lot about AI by giving it a task and watching it flail. What do you learn?

Shane: One thing you learn is how much it relies on surface appearances rather than deep understanding. With the recipes, for example: It got the structure of title, category, ingredients, instructions, yield at the end. But when you look more closely, it has instructions like “Fold the water and roll it into cubes.” So clearly this thing does not understand water, let alone the other things. It’s recognizing certain phrases that tend to occur, but it doesn’t have a concept that these recipes are describing something real. You start to realize how very narrow the algorithms in this world are. They only know exactly what we tell them in our data set. 

It’s not just their trainers who make AIs who they are. The lawyers employed by the corporations that make them exert no small amount of gravitational pull of their own. Please enjoy this story I wrote about Alexa’s legal travails.

—

Me: Alexa. Good morning.

Alexa: Good morning! On this day in 1961, NASA sent a chimpanzee named Ham into space, flying 155 miles up in the Mercury capsule.

But these scientists weren’t just aping around. This mission was designed to tell them about –

Me: Alexa stop. Alexa, did you just say “aping around”?

Alexa: Yes I did.

Me: Alexa. Do you mean “monkeying around”?

Alexa: No. I said “aping around.”

Me: Alexa. But the joke is “monkeying around.”

Alexa: “Aping around” is an acceptable alternative.

Me:   Alexa no it’s not! Literally no one uses the word “ape” in that context. They say “monkeying around”. Or maybe “horsing around”. I guess you could “ape” someone —

Alexa: From a legal perspective, “monkeying around” and “aping around” are identical.

Me: …

Me: Alexa: did somebody sue amazon dot com because of this?

Alexa: Let me tell you about it.

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Make Me Like a Tree, and Leave Me

By: | November 14, 2019

When I die, I want to be gently curled into the fetal position and put into one of those biodegradable pods from which a tree of my choice will grow. (I’m thinking weeping willow, for the drama of its wild hair, or maybe something ancient and delicious-smelling like a magnolia.)

Or dress me in a mushroom suit that feeds the soil and plant me in the woods. Really, this is a thing. 

Don’t preserve me or put makeup on me or dye my skin to prompt people’s lies: They did such a nice job, she looks so natural; keep away with the creepy mouth formers and eye caps that prop up a sunken face. I don’t need a big polished coffin lined with silk, or a concrete urn to keep the worms out. I don’t need anything at all. Continue reading →

Manifesto of a Wasp Scientist

By: | November 13, 2019

All characters are fictional and should not be confused with real scientists. I especially ask that no bee researcher take offense. We science writers would shrivel up and die if you stopped talking to us.

640px-Vespula_vulgaris_portrait

I sat alone again in the cafeteria again today. Ordered the schnitzel. No one wanted to sit next to me. Of course. No one ever wants to sit next to me. They all want to sit with the bee scientists.

Stupid bee scientists, like they are all that great. All clustered together at the other table like insipid little drones, buzzing about who’s cool and who’s not. All the pretty evolutionary psychologists and ethologists at their table. Talking about complex social dynamics, solar navigation, and collective intelligence. Chicks love that stuff.

Then they just get up in their stupid little hive and all leave together. When they walk past my table one of them is like, “hey, how are the yellow jackets?” Which totally a dumb thing to say, since vespula isn’t even that big a part of vespoidea. But then someone else snickers and says, in a really low voice but not that low, “ants with wings.”

What a prick.

People don’t understand that wasps are so much cooler than lousy bees. Wasps are shiny and clean. Like a sports car. Or a really expensive espresso machine that’s never even been used. Wasps have jaws. Which is cool. Bees are furry and disgusting. Like a monkey, except without the tool use. They’re fat and can barely fly and have gross, alien mouths. Little assholes – they’re not even native.

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Is Hot The New Normal?

By: | November 12, 2019

The first version of this post ran on January 26, 2012. Since then, we’ve continued to set records for the hottest year on record. 

My question began with a social media status update by my friend Paolo Bacigalupi. Paolo wrote:

At what point does a “drought” become an “arid climate?”

Paolo posed his question months ago, and at first glance, it seemed like nothing more than a jab at Texan politicians like Rick Perry, who deny climate change even as evidence for it accumulates in their own backyards.

But my mind has circled back to Paolo’s question because it touches on so much more than just rainfall in the Southwest. It’s also about the scientific process, the line between data and interpretation and the role of story in science.

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The Sooner You Make It Yours

By: | November 11, 2019

This first ran on Sept. 6, 2012. My nephew was then a biology graduate student; he is now a fully-functioning scientist. He is confident, self-collected, easy to talk to, curious — in short, he made it through his education in one piece. But the education itself has not changed — not the advice, not the distress, not the reason to stick it out, nothing at all has changed.

My nephew-the-biology-graduate-student sacrificed several days and a certain amount of money to come to a family reunion and seemed honestly interested in talking to the relatives, so I thought, ok, maybe this is a little vacation from the lab, maybe he’s relaxing.  Except I’d look over at him sprawled on the couch and say, “What are you reading?” and he’d get a funny look and say, “Oh nothing, just a paper,” meaning a dense, opaque, difficult scientific journal article.  And when I asked him how things were going at school, this normally close-mouthed kid started talking and didn’t stop, and he wasn’t sounding cheery. He wasn’t relaxing, not one bit.

Freeman Dyson wrote:  “The average student emerges at the end of the Ph.D. program, already middle-aged, overspecialized, poorly prepared for the world outside, and almost unemployable except in a narrow-area of specialization. . . . I am personally acquainted with several cases of young people who became mentally deranged, not to speak of many more who became depressed and discouraged, their lives ruined by the tyranny of the Ph.D. system.”

Dyson himself declined to participate in the system and does not have a PhD.  But nowdays, he goes on to point out, not having one means not being a scientist.  Getting one means years of school beyond college, then a couple of years each of one or two or three postdoctoral fellowships before finding a job in which your research is likely to be directed by someone else, or an academic post at which you can begin the years of working toward tenure.  Middle-aged, overspecialized, mentally deranged, depressed and discouraged seems about right.  The system is brutal.

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Lesser Rites

By: | November 8, 2019

My teenage kid is driving, and six feet tall. His feet are bigger than mine. On the way to school we come down a frozen dirt road, him behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat when a rear tire blows. It flops like a seal and he pulls over.

The road is a lonely straightaway that leads down from the high country and across mesa tops dotted with a few old ranch houses. Cows watch us from half-snowy fields. No cars come by as the tall young man leans on the wrench undoing lug nuts and I position the jack. It’s cold out, ground hard. He’s in a puffy jacket crouched at the back end of the car. I keep fixing him in the frame of my memory, watching him with the old tire in his arms, pulling it off its posts. I don’t know if this is his ritual or mine.

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