Shitty robots and their shitty blog posts

By: | September 6, 2021

I recently took an ultra-fun workshop run by the Queen of Shitty Robots, Simone Giertz. It’s the second of hers I’ve done, the first being a lightening round of Lego Mindstorm building to create robots that would then be raced against each other over the distance of one meter. This time, we were creating robot artists whose little servomotors would brush a canvas with markers and paintbrushes and highlighters to express their little robot souls.

My team went for iconography and a predictable result, on the right.

When it comes to artificial intelligence and creative tasks, results are not predictable, per se, but they do rely on what you feed the AI. I did some poking around to see whether I could create a blog post ‘in the style of Last Word on Nothing’, because I wondered whether the dozens of writers who have contributed to this site, past and present, had a collective style.

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The Caldor Fire Donation Center

By: | September 3, 2021

(A poem for the evacuees. Pete and I are safe.)

At the rummage sale at the end of the world, you don’t have to pay for anything.

Strangers disgorge their closets for you: Dirty tennis shoes, used underwear, new dresses from Ann Taylor with the tags still attached. You rifle through the clothes, trying to ignore the greasy residue they leave on your fingers.

There’s a baseball cap brought back as a souvenir from Dubrovnik. A soft, chevron-patterned airplane blanket that someone wore draped over their knees on a first class flight with United Airlines. Miniature Lucky Brand jeans that could fit a three-year-old, rows of baby shoes, a polo shirt from a PGA tournament.

You did not choose well in the final minutes. You are like the man who fled his house carrying only tennis balls, the woman who filled her purse with oatmeal. 

Now people expect you to make better choices, and to be grateful: Yes! to the ugly shoes with comfortable insoles. No! to the floor-length, faux fur coat and this pair of four-inch heels studded with green rhinestones.

And yet. That coat! It’s 100 degrees out during the day, but the nights are getting chilly. Its glossy dark fur reminds you of the black bear on the highway with scorched paws, crawling on its forearms. Who knows what you will need in this new life you’re going to build. 

You take the coat. You leave the heels.

Doom and the dogmometer

By: | September 1, 2021

As we head into wave after wave of 100+ degrees Farhenheit temperatures in my home valley in Washington, this post from 2017 seemed worth re-upping:

One way to understand a really big problem is to break it down into more manageable parts. That’s why scientists use specific, smaller systems to help them grasp the overall health of the planet. The Arctic, for example, is regarded as a bellwether for the catastrophes of climate change that will soon afflict us all, thanks to its temperatures that are rising faster than those in any other region on Earth. There’s also the escalating loss of glacier ice around the world. Or this week’s “heat attack,” which will basically force residents of the American Southwest to go hide deep underground in caves or risk perishing in temperatures predicted to climb past 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

But since long before the famous hockey stick graph, scientists have also secretly relied on another, much more ancient analog to skry the hot ’n’ doomy future: The dogmometer.

The dogmometer is an accurate indicator of ambient air temperature, gradating from “so cold I have reduced my body to the size of a fist and buried my face in my own butt” to “all the other dog owners buy kiddie pools when it’s this hot, you asshat” and “OK I’m basically dead of hotness I will never move again not even for treats.” But its readings are more precise than a regular thermometer’s, because they also incorporate a dog’s uncanny ability to pick up on ambient vibes to put those temperatures in local, regional, and even global ecological and geopolitical context.

Even better, you don’t need some fancy degree to read a dogmometer. And you’d better learn, because with Trump in the Whitehouse, U.S. government funding for climate change research is bound to plunge. Here, let’s go through some examples.

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Fig of My Imagination

By: | August 30, 2021

It’s fig season again! This post first ran in October 2019. Now we have a squirrel who I’m competing with to get the ripe ones off our bigger tree. And our little tree? It’s still little, with about six figs and two leafy branches. Maybe I’m imagining it, but the branches seem a little stronger and the leaves a little greener than they were two years ago. I do know that the fig I just picked from the tree was wonderfully ripe–and now, it’s gone.

*

When we first moved into this house, we planted a fig tree in the backyard. It looked sad and scraggly for a long time—years, in fact. I would go over to the houses of friends who had fig trees in August, and these trees would be dripping with figs. I would ask how old the trees were, and they’d say things like, “Oh, we planted that last year!” I would come home and make puppy dog eyes at my little fig tree.

And then—BOOM! Five years ago, August came, and the figs were there. I’d battle it out with the birds to get the fruit first. We got a net to protect the figs. The birds figured out how to get into the net, although sometimes they needed help getting out. I would curse the birds as I peeled the net away—they’d fly off and I’d feel happy, but slightly miffed that they’d gotten something I wanted. Then a year came when we had to have friends help pick it because there were too many. There were even figs left after the birds got in and out of the net.

This year, there were so many figs that the birds couldn’t keep up either. We never put the net up. Every day, there are more figs, sitting on their stems like purple jewels. The ground below is littered with ones we haven’t gotten in time. In the morning the air around the tree smells sweet; in the height of the day when the sun beats down, it smells like the morning after a fig wine bender.

People have been reveling in the fig for thousands of years—it may be the earliest cultivated fruit. Researchers excavating in a village in the Jordan Valley found nine carbonized figs dating back more than 11,000 years, even before crops like wheat, corn and barley emerged. These were parthenocarpic figs, which means they don’t need insects for pollination—to produce more trees, people would have planted stems. These planted stems grow roots and leaves and their very own figs. The researchers explained that people at the time must have recognized that these fig fruits did not turn into new plants on their own, and started to cultivate these edible—yet non-reproductive—figs, following meandering mutations of these natural clones to develop the taste of the fruit. And the fruit isn’t even really a fruit—it’s a part of the stem that has grown into a teardrop-shaped container for the plant’s flowers.

In the middle of October, the fig leaves are starting to turn yellow; soon, there will be no more fruit. But there is another fig tree on the shadier side of the yard. These ones are Genoa figs, pale green with hot pink inside. We planted this tree about eight years ago, when my son was born. It has been slow to grow, mostly looking like a dowsing stick. This year, it has two short leaf-covered branches and has produced a half-dozen figs.

Elsewhere in the world, researchers are using fig trees like Ficus elastisca and Ficus thonningii to build resilience in the face of climate change. These superpower figs can shore up hillsides and provide drought-resistant food for livestock.

Our little Ficus carica trees can’t do much but feed us and the birds between August and October. But having one fig tree already has given me a little more patience with the second. Someday, we may have to fight the birds over our little green-figged tree. Someday, there may be more than enough to share.

*

Image by Flickr user Jack Fussell under Creative Commons license

Mystery Treats

By: | August 27, 2021

This week Elise and I completed one of our lives’ great adventures, the John Muir Trail, the legendary footpath that wends along the granitic spine of California’s Sierra Nevadas. In point of fact it’s more accurate to say that she completed it, walking virtually the entire 200-mile course from Yosemite National Park to Mount Whitney’s talus-strewn flanks, while I was merely privileged to serve as her sidekick for the last 140 miles. It was a spectacular, transformative trip, graced by pikas and golden trout and black bears and so much granite — vast, towering, monolithic blocks and wedges and spires of granite. Even the pall of wildfire smoke felt oddly appropriate, a reminder that our journey took place within climate change’s all-devouring context.

Having never before attempted a through-hike, I didn’t realize what a collaborative endeavor it would turn out to be. The writings of Cheryl Strayed have perhaps conveyed the impression that long hikes are solitary endeavors that test individual mettle. Not so. Perhaps we’re less self-reliant than most, but our hike was abetted by a pit crew of trail angels: Nick and Alicia kept our plants alive; Carl and Emily minded our dog; Michael and (a different) Emily doled out advice; Terence and Cecelia offered us a Bay Area basecamp; Jeremy and Owen put hundreds of miles on their Volvo in support of our elaborate logistics. Apparently it takes a village to convey two people through the mountains, or at least these two people.

And then there was Charles.

A few words here about the mechanics of hiking the John Muir Trail: Unless you’re traveling exceedingly light and fast, the JMT is too long to finish on a single load of food. Instead, you need to resupply — at least once, usually twice, or even three times. One popular resupply point is at an area called Onion Valley, which JMTers must depart the trail to access, in the process hiking eight miles over a fearsome 12,000 foot saddle of rock called Kearsarge Pass. It’s an arduous, exhausting headache that costs hikers a day or two, not to mention a few gallons of sweat. 

We, however, had an ace in the hole: Charles, a lifelong friend who also happens to be an experienced outdoorsman (as well as a programmer, medical entrepreneur, Chinese scholar, and general polymath). Charles and his partner, Alexis, live in Santa Monica, which puts them a fairly easy drive from Onion Valley. Months before the trip, Elise emailed Charles and asked if he might be willing to restock us, a proposition to which he cheerfully agreed. Thanks to his generosity, we wouldn’t have to drag our asses over Kearsarge and back; instead, Charles would meet us on the trail with a bundle of precious foodstuffs. The mountain would come to Mohammed. 

The mountain would also come bearing gifts. In an email, Charles confirmed that, in addition to the dried and prepackaged schlock we’d sent him — oatmeal, dried chili, energy bars — he and Alexis would bring us something considerably more appealing: Mystery Treats. The Mystery Treats would remain, by definition, unspecified. But Charles and Alexis are epicures, and we were sure that any goodies from their cupboard would be worth the wait.

***

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Guest Post: the Vastness of a Chord

By: | August 25, 2021

Deep Note, which made its debut on May 25th, 1983, at the premiere of Return of the Jedi, is a 30-second tour de force of electronic music. It would play in those few minutes of darkness before the featured movie began, just after the adverts for oversized and overpriced sodas and containers of popcorn.

Here’s me on Deep Note: Eyes closed. Shallow breath. Relaxed to the point of feeling bodiless. A Buddha smile as Deep Note’s first sonic hints buffet those tiny bundles of sound-sensitive hair cells in my cochleas. Then, as the Deep Note algorithm orchestrates the build, climax, and resolution into the final chord, I go full-in with that sequence. My skin toggles from its boundary-from-the-universe setting to a connected-to-everything setting. Vastness, this is, as Yoda might say. Thirty seconds. Trippy deep. Then, just like that, it’s movie time. I do not know if others in the theater shared my transient freefall into vastness, but I hope at least some of them did.

Deep Note, which served as an audio logo for THX, a company that director George Lucas established to develop technologies for upgrading the experience of moviegoers, originally consisted of 30 electronic tones, or voices, spanning over ten octaves. These evolve from an initially dim and menacing din into a chord of such shimmering coherence, grandeur, and expansiveness that for me it is nothing short of epiphanic every time I hear it. Here is how I know I am not exaggerating: Deep Note made it into the script of the Simpsons episode that aired on April 14, 1994, in which the head of an animated moviegoer listening to Deep Note explodes. One of these days, I would like to treat Dr. James ‘Andy’ Moorer, the sound engineer and artist who created Deep Note, to an epic thank-you dinner.

After the 1983 premier of Deep Note, whenever I would go to a movie at a theater that had been audio-equipped and certified by THX, I knew I would experience a transporting moment of vastness when Moorer’s Deep Note would crescendo out of the theater’s speakers. For me, the sound was always so expansive and uplifting that I would find myself grasping the armrests and closing my eyes so as not to squander one instant of vastness from the waveform emanating like magma from the theater’s sound system. Just as you lose the pleasure of chocolate if you multitask while reading a book or even listening to music, you can lose Deep Note’s moment of vastness if you hear it without devoting your full listening attention to it. To listen to Deep Note while crunching on popcorn is like reading an ad for hemorrhoid medicine while standing in front the Mona Lisa at the Louvre. I have never done either of those things.

In an interview on the podcast Twenty-Thousand Hertz, which features the sounds in our lives, Moorer revealed that among his inspirations for Deep Note were two of my own all-time favorite pieces of music. I listened to these over and over in my younger years when I used to haul from dorm room to group house to apartment a set of milk carts filled with vinyl records and a pair of enormous Cerwin Vega speakers.

On one of those albums, the Beatles’ St. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, at about the midpoint and toward the end the song A Day in the Life, are orchestral musical buildups that seem like they might not end. That was one of Moorer’s inspirations for Deep Note. And so was Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in E Minor. This piece is my favorite one on another album—Bach Organ Favorites played by E. Power Biggs—that was in that long-gone vinyl collection of mine. In addition to having an impossibly apropos name for a musician who played the world’s most magnificent pipe organs, Biggs had a set of the biggest hands I had ever seen. On the album cover, he sits at a gorgeous pipe organ, his giant paws resting on his lap. “Bach’s fugue, after noodling around a little, builds this huge chord that resolves in just this massive massive chord,” Moorer says. Here, Moorer sounds like me describing Deep Note!

These two already vast musical moments were merely the points of departure for Moorer. To achieve Deep Note, he built on these inspirations with a combination of what in 1983 was leading-edge electronic audio technology along with some arcane and psycho-acoustically fantastic musical choices. Summoning his Stanford training as an electric engineer, he designed and built his own “digital signal processor,” a DSP. That’s a specialized computer for arithmetic calculations associated with digital audio data. He also wrote out 200,000 or so lines of computer code to operate his one-off DSP. All of that took about two years.

But it might have been two nuances that only deeply learned musicians would even know to try that made Deep Note so powerful for me and that exploded the head of that Simpsons character. One of these was Moorer’s choice to swap out the usual “equal temperament” tuning of the chromatic scale of musical tones for a 2500-year-old tonal framework known as “Pythagorean tuning.” The other pivotal nuance Moorer embraced has to do with the 30 oscillators, aka notes, aka voices, which his algorithm randomly assigned at first within a specified range of frequencies. These voices fluctuate (that menacing din I described earlier) at first. Then each voice makes its way toward one of eleven target notes that span over a range wider than a piano’s. But wait, there’s more. Moorer assigned two or three oscillators to each target note along with this sonic twist: rather than assuring these sets of voices would sing out in perfect unison when they reached their respective target notes, Moorer made sure that the several oscillators assigned to each end note would be slightly de-tuned when they reached the destination frequency. This detuning detail, Moorer said, “is what makes the final chord shimmer.” For me all of this innovation harmonizes into an audio metaphor for the great expansion of the universe after the Big Bang in which all points of the universe race away from each other and yet collectively yield a cosmos of utmost beauty and power.

Though no longer a routine feature of movies, Deep Note still is, in its various renditions (some with up to 90 voices), a rapturous sonic experience best absorbed when wholly relaxed with eyes closed, at high volume, and pumping through a kick-ass sound system. I miss my Cerwin Vegas. With willing abandon, this chord can transport you parsecs beyond the smallness of the actual space you occupy and the few seconds it takes to hear Deep Note. So finally, here it is: Deep Note can envelop you within an uplifting vastness conjured by sound crafted by math, electronic and audio engineering, and artistic sensibility to engage the evolutionary gift of our ears and brains in a way that provides momentary transcendence from our exquisite finitude.

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Ivan Amato is a writer, podcaster, science-cafe facilitator, and crystal photomicrographer in Hyattsville, MD. Currently he also is working on a book of essays about a diversity of vastnesses in his life.

THX, the THX Logo, and the THX Deep Note audio mark are the property of THX Ltd., registered in the U.S. and other countries.

And yet still grow

By: | August 23, 2021

The smoke started
while I was in the air.
I first saw it,
after my plane landed,
as a video on my phone—
a gold and gray billow
just two miles into the mountains
from the green property
where we lived.
“Oh good, you’re home.
You can help protect the house
from the new wildfire,”
my landlord texted, joking,
but only half.

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fire season

By: | August 18, 2021
Smoky Seattle, 2020.

This year, for our anniversary, my husband and I went backpacking. As we left Seattle, the sky was a clear, bright blue, and all the mountains were out: you could see depth in the Olympic range, and Rainier looked stunning as usual, if a little snow-bare. The hike was blissfully shaded and generously graded, the campsites delightfully deserted, the lake deliciously frigid. We were in bed by 8:30 and set an alarm to wake up at 3am to catch the Perseids. It was a perfect day.

As we settled back in the tent after the meteor shower, the winds suddenly shifted. The cool night air grew strangely hot, and carried the strong scent of smoke. Our tent whipped around in the gusts as pine needles rained down on us. I sat up in my sleeping bag to have a look outside: had a wildfire started somewhere near us? We were, after all, getting our second heat wave of the summer, and so much of the western part of the country was already burning. Sensing my panic, my husband suggested we just pack up and head out, and we were back at the car by 7:30am. It turns out there had been two new fires in Seattle that day, but none in the mountains where we’d hiked.

That day, I realized climate change has created a new anxiety for me (as if I needed more anxieties): being trapped in the backcountry during a wildfire. Usually, when I feel anxious about something, I try to make sense of the actual risk involved, and how to mitigate that risk to calm myself down. For instance, after a few unpleasantly close encounters with bears on a previous trip, I developed a bear anxiety, but after some research on bear behavior, brushing up on what to do (or not to do) if a bear appears, and making sure my bear hang game is strong, I feel less worried.

But I have no idea what to do about my fire anxiety. I checked the local fire situation before we left, but with how quickly fires can start and spread, it’s quite possible one could erupt while I’m hiking, especially on multi-day trips. I know that most fires aren’t mega firestorms, but “unprecedented” seems to be the norm now — what can I do if one breaks out where I’m hiking? The only thought my husband and I had in the moment was to get in the freezing lake with our dog, just like 200 hikers in the Sierra did during last year’s Creek Fire. Reading news articles has only made me more anxious; there are so many stories of hikers getting trapped and narrowly surviving, and reveal terrifying details I hadn’t considered, like the fact that synthetic clothing can melt onto your body in high heat.

A couple days after our hike, we set off on a road trip from Seattle to the Colorado Rockies. On the first day, we drove 1,000 miles to Park City, Utah, and our entire drive was clouded with smoke. As we drove through each town, I checked the air quality index, and it was always in the “unhealthy” range — over 150. In some places, visibility was limited to about a quarter mile. When we finally got close to Park City, we learned a wildfire had just broken out in some nearby mountains that afternoon, and was growing quickly. The highway we’d planned to take had temporarily closed as fire crews worked and residents evacuated.

I can’t shake this feeling that the fires and their smoke are following me. Really, they are following all of us. If we’re lucky, it just filters the sun’s light into a disconcerting coral color; if we’re not, we lose our homes, our towns, our loved ones. Summer was once my favorite season. Now, it is the time of year my climate grief reaches its peak as new records are broken again and again. Each time I learn about some awful moment in history, I wonder how people just continued living their lives amidst the chaos, and I realize I am doing that right now. Every day I sit down at my computer and I type emails and look at memes and pet my dog and make dinner. Sometimes I get angry reading the news and I talk about climate change with my friends. I sort the garbage and compost and recycling and wonder if it makes any difference. I vote for people who advocate for more climate friendly policies and more often than not, they let me down. What else is there to do?

(Photo from Wikimedia Commons.)