Redux: Funny Bird

By: | April 27, 2018

 

shutterstock_336230168Here’s a post from 2016 that still makes me smile. You, too?

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Here comes dawn. The sky yawns and the sun flicks its lids above the horizon. But just before the lights come up on Virginia’s rolling hills, the sound of morning commences. Can we call it a song? That might be a stretch. There’s a certain musicality to it. You’re no doubt familiar with its silly refrain.

Loud and untidy, cock-a-doodle-doo is an enthusiastic drunkard’s karaoke. It’s also a wake-up alarm in much of the rural U.S. If you’re still asleep when this barnyard bird opens its beak, as you should be, you may start dreaming of rooster soup for breakfast. Few of us still have to get up to milk the cows, Cock, and regardless, your rise-and-shine call is awfully brash for a first act.

In parts of Australia, dawn has a very different theme song. Meet the kookaburra, specifically Dacelo novaeguineae. As a visitor, I found it hard to be irritated at the sound of hysterical laughter, even as a 5 a.m. alarm. These stocky, big-beaked birds laugh every day like clockwork around dawn and dusk—plus now and then in between—and they do so as a family. It’s kind of charming: One starts to crack up and then the rest join in, as if just getting the joke.

A not-a-morning-person Aussie may beg to differ on the charm thing. The dawn racket is probably just damn annoying. But as a tourist, I woke up extra early and sat by the window in the dark, waiting for the cackling to begin.

Continue reading →

Dinner With Famous Women

By: | April 26, 2018

“It’s like Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls, but on dinner plates,” I told my nine-year-old daughter during a recent trip to London. She wasn’t entirely convinced, but she agreed to go with me and a friend to see the long-lost Famous Women Dinner Service, a set of 50 plates painted by the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

Plates! I know: boring. But I promise you, as I promised my daughter, that these plates are not boring. Here’s their story.

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Regarding INC5760131: How to Navigate the Reply-All Apocalypse

By: | April 25, 2018

It began with a software engineer in India. The man’s email signature says that he works in “Dreams Sustainment (Offshore).” His note with the subject line “Regarding INC5760131” referred to some technical issue that was virtually incomprehensible to anyone who was not among the email’s intended recipients. And there were a lot of unintended recipients. Somehow this poor guy managed to copy everyone working in ESPN content.

That’s a lot of people. ESPN employs about 8,000 people worldwide, and during a single short burst that morning, his misdirected email spawned something like 138 replies. I know this, because I work for ESPN and was on the receiving end of the email tsunami.

The NC5760131 fiasco was no isolated incident. In 2012, an NYU student accidentally sent a query about his tuition payment to 39,979 other students. Time Inc and Reuters have also suffered reply-all incidents, but these incidents are nothing compared to a test message sent to UK’s National Health Service’s 1.2 million members, which created a deluge of emails so big that it crashed the system.

“Regarding NC5760131” wasn’t my first involuntary ride on a reply-all train. Not long before that email thread clogged my inbox, I found myself copied on an email thread about Kay’s hip surgery. I still don’t know who Kay is, but it seemed that her surgery had gone well, and the other 28 people on the thread were eager to congratulate her. I would have just deleted these emails and set up a filter to send them directly to spam, but once I started reading these notes, I couldn’t stop. Continue reading →

Who’s Afraid of Roko’s Basilisk?

By: | April 24, 2018

If you’re like most people, you haven’t heard of Roko’s Basilisk. If you’re like most of the people who have heard of Roko’s Basilisk, there’s a good chance you started to look into it, encountered the phrase “timeless decision theory”, and  immediately stopped looking into it.

However, if you did manage to slog through the perils of rational philosophy, you now understand Roko’s Basilisk. Congratulations! Your reward is a lifetime of terrorised agony, enslaved to a being that does not yet exist but that will torture you for all eternity should you deviate even for a moment from doing its bidding. According to internet folklore.

The internet has no shortage of BS and creepy urban legends, but because Roko’s Basilisk involves AI and the future of technology, otherwise-credible people insist that the threat is real – and so dangerous that Eliezer Yudkowsky, the moderator of rationalist forum Less Wrong, fastidiously scrubbed all mention of the term from the site. “The original version of [Roko’s] post caused actual psychological damage to at least some readers,” he wrote. “Please discontinue all further discussion of the banned topic.”

Intrigued? Yeah, me too. So despite the warnings, I set out to try to understand Roko’s Basilisk. By doing so, was I sealing my fate forever? And worse – have I put YOU in mortal danger?

This is a science blog so I’m going to put the spoiler right at the top – Roko’s Basilisk is stupid. Unless the sum of all your fears is to be annoyed by watered-down philosophy and reheated thought experiments, it is not hazardous to keep reading. However, although a terrorising AI is unlikely to reach back from the future to enslave you, there are some surprisingly convincing reasons to fear Roko’s Basilisk. Continue reading →

Ideas Are A Bucket of Eels

By: | April 23, 2018

In the past year I’ve gotten extremely interested in books about creativity and creation. I used to hate these kinds of books. I thought they were self indulgent and annoying. And many of them are. But I’ve found a few I really like, and I like them because they don’t actually talk all that much about how to come up with ideas. In fact, they are blunt and sometimes cruel about ideas. They don’t matter, they say, they only matter if you can use them. In fact, some go so far as to say that ideas are not even yours unless you do something with them.

If I may brag for a moment, ideas are almost never my problem. Whenever students or audience members at a talk ask “how do you get your ideas” I always struggle. I can’t really imagine having trouble thinking of ideas. Which means I’m one of those surely insufferable people who goes on about how ideas are everywhere, in everything. I’m sure it sounds incredibly annoying to someone who is stuck trying to come up with ideas. We’re not trying to be annoying, I promise. It’s just a hard question to answer. (And in the moments when I do struggle, I have some tricks, which I’ve written about here before).

Ideas aren’t my problem, figuring out which ones to use and what to do with them is. You can have a million ideas and if you do nothing with them then what good are they? And, for me at least, ideas are often like glow sticks. You know the kind you have to break and shake to make glow? They only glow for a certain period of time. After a while, they fade, and become dull plastic sticks that I’m gathering in a pile in the corner of the room.

This isn’t always the case. I have a few ideas right now that are still glowing, radioactive almost, in the pile. They’re so alluring they’re a little bit scary because they might cause terrible cancer or I might not really be able to truly pick them up and do them justice. I’ve rambled at my friends about these ideas, but they remain scribbled notes in a notebook. Drawings and scenes and tree diagrams, thoughts about how to best execute them, character sketches and coding questions.

Which is what led me to these books about creativity. Because in my mind, true creativity isn’t about ideas, it’s about execution. And I was struggle to even begin. Some of the books were incredibly useful! But as I was reading them, I kept getting stuck on something. Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | April 21, 2018

April 16-20

For much of the country, spring warmth is too long in coming this year. Much too long. But we are well past the equinox and the days are getting longer, and that means the running and buzzing and frolicking is under way. Some of the heightened activity means animals are getting busy, Ann recalls, but some of it is just jumping and leaping and boinging because it’s spring, and there’s just something about spring.

Traveling can be exhausting, but staying anchored in one place can also bring on a sense of restlessness. After frenetic months of globetrotting, Sarah is not traveling for a while, and instead stares out the window in an effort to conjure words and meaning. But she remembers why it’s important to keep the possibility of distant places close at hand, and close in mind.

Meanwhile, the Earth itself moves, in a destructive act of creation. Or maybe a creative act of destruction. Lava flows consume homes, structures, living things, entire swathes of rainforest on the islands of Hawaii. But as Craig learned, molten rock moving over the face of the Earth leaves something new in its wake.

Guest Emily Underwood tells us how some types of spiders move around: By paragliding, using wispy sails of their own making. Spider ballooning is still not well understood. Sometimes spiderlings do it to escape cannibalizing siblings; adults might do it to flee floods or other hazards. They don’t overthink it, or worry about where they’ll end up: They just let go, and sail away.

In a similar way, preteen cheerleaders may be less concerned with how they are perceived than we might expect. Jessa stumbles upon the international Sea to Sky Cheerleading Championships and realizes the glitzy girls are not sexualized prepubescents, but serious competitors who are in their element: Memorizing and performing long routines, just as any child would at that life stage.

See you next week, when spring will have finally arrived, we hope!

Cheerleading and the Latin Trivium

By: | April 20, 2018

Convention centers are funny places. They create insular worlds during any given symposium, but on the margins between those events they hold space for some random intermixing of cosmologies—the kind of interdisciplinary cross-pollination that open-plan architects could only dream of. Such a confluence occurred the weekend before the TED conference in Vancouver this year.

I arrived early to prepare a workshop and get over whatever slight jetlag exists between North American coasts, but the moment I stepped in the elevator I knew there was more happening here than TED. Four children of different heights stood in boredom with their parents, their hair variously sprayed into a strange high pony tail or woven into a hair piece.

Their eyelashes looked like the rays on a child’s drawing of Mr. Sun. The blood-red lipstick was disturbing, and outlandishly large bows that were not really bows adorned the tops of their heads. These children were cheerleaders, and they were here for the international Sea to Sky Cheerleading Championships. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Ballooning Spiders

By: | April 19, 2018
My favorite walk. Of course the paragliders hid today.

Most spring days on my favorite walk, I watch a small group of people wearing packs trudge up a grassy hill. Once they reach the top they spread out colorful sails, put on harnesses and jog forward. The wing behind them fills with air and lifts them up, and they glide like birds above the California foothills.

Last week I saw a paraglider climb into the sky until his sail was a black dot wavering against bright-white cirrus clouds. Was he ok? Could he land safely?  I never found out. But watching him disappear reminded me of a story I recently wrote about flying spiders.

The first person to describe flying spiders was a bewigged 17th century English naturalist named Martin Lister. A bit of a curiosity himself, Lister described how more than 30 different species of spiders molt and court. He counted their eyes. To give you a taste of the level of detail he captured over years of observation, here are a few chapter titles from his 1638 book The English Spiders:

Of the two-eyed spiders

Of the eight-eyed spiders

Of the diet of spiders, and their means of hunting; and also of wasps, the spiders’ enemies

Of sheet-web spiders that are satisfied with a very small web for catching prey within which they also build their nests

Of medicaments from spiders: For earache Lister recommended spiders steeped in olive oil or rosewater; for hysteria, wax salve of spiders applied to the navel. He also believed you could catch syphillis by eating venomous iguanas. You would not have wanted Lister to be your doctor. Continue reading →