What am I up to now?
November, 2026
Contents
Updates
I have missed autumn. I didn’t get any last year, between California, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone, and if I am to accept more California, that means I have to go out and seek autumn. A couple of weeks in London and Oxford did it! The trees were puzzlingly green for late October, but it was cold and damp and fall-ish. Freetown, on the other hand, was experiencing a late rainy season, with plenty of thunderstorms.
I turned 30 at the end of October, and spent a few days in a redwood cabin in Sonoma.“I wouldn’t know how to dwell in a treeless country, and where I live now, the compass of my dreams always points north. The redwood forest, the remains of a virgin sequoia forest. The interiors of certain Gothic cathedrals—Strasbourg, for example—replicate man’s smallness and helplessness in his middle zone between hell and heaven, amid the columns of the primeval forests which still covered large areas of Europe when the cathedrals were built. But Europe never had trees like the redwoods, whose life spans number over two thousand years. This forest is the idea of forest, a prototype drawn by God; no church columns attain that height, and never does a church’s semi-darkness contrast so sharply with a ray slanting in from above the reach of sight. Small human figures are diminished not by the redwoods’ trunks, too huge for comparisons, but by a lower level, in relation to ferns larger than a man and to the fallen, moss-covered logs which sprout new green shoots. To confirm their value as a forest symbol: the redwoods are such that the chunk of a felled tree does not die but regenerates itself in a multitude of swiftly growing sprigs.” (Czesław Miłosz, Visions from San Francisco Bay, 1969) I brought my girlfriend to one of my favorite groves, Montgomery Woods in Mendocino, which briefly had the tallest known tree in the world from 1999 to 2000. Montgomery Woods is the most awesome redwood grove accessible from San Francisco; the trees are on a floodplain at the base of a steep canyon, whose walls protected them from logging until they could be protected in the 1940s.
This is also, I suppose, the beginning of the fifth year of my PhD. When I look back at the projects I listed at the beginning of my third year, I feel both accomplished and a bit naive. Some of them are finished; others have disappeared entirely; others have come and gone in the meanwhile. The projects I’m most excited about are still brewing.
I’ll be around SF for the first half of November, then on the east coast for friends’ wedding and Thanksgiving. If you’re around DC or Boston, please do say hello.
The Book of the New Sun
Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun (1980-83)
Look, I might get in trouble for this, but I find The Book of the New Sun facile and uninteresting. This is Gene Wolfe’s beloved four-book series about a journeyman torturer, Severian, who [spoilers] is a metaphor for Christ. The most common rebuttal when I’ve expressed this opinion over the past years has been, Oh, most of the value comes on a re-read; the puzzles are only solved backwards; on your first read, you’re lost in the complex structure of the book. Well, I re-read all four books this month, and I did not change my mind.
It’s like the worst of Neal Stephenson and the worst of Jorge Luis Borges combined. Those are two of my favorite authors. And the “mediocre” of both of them, combined, would be amazing. It would be one of my favorite books ever. But it’s the worst of both. Borges, incapable of characterization. Stephenson, at times incapable of controlling his world building.
It reminded me of nothing as much as C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Lewis needed the wiggle room of fantasy and the mind space of children for Narnia to work so well. In the Space Trilogy writing adults and dealing with things that are slightly too weird but totally of his own world, nothing ages well.
I feel very similar about Wolfe here. If the books are about predestination, I wanted to see how it works. Severian keeps getting rescued by people who already know he’s going to be emperor (“None but poor playwrights do it,” one says after the rescue). If the books are about a timeloop, the loop never closes in the series (though we are apparently told in the fifth book, outside of the series). If the books are about the characters, I found them wooden. Severian tells us at the end:
Before you assume that I have cheated you, read again, as I will write again.
I did. I was. Please don’t.
Links
Menopause, I learned from Dynomight, is a distinctly human phenomenon.
We’re still struggling to reconcile modernity with the short human reproductive interval. But did you know that menopause is almost unknown outside of humans? Even the other great apes remain fertile for almost their entire lives. The only known exceptions are (1) killer whales, (2) pilot whales, (3) beluga whales, (4) false killer whales, (5) narwhals, and (6) one specific population of chimpanzees in Uganda.
What should you do when a paper or grant proposal you’re reviewing feels like it’s written by AI, but you can’t prove it? My response so far has been, like a coward, to give a middling review and use hedging language to indicate my suspicion. This editor of Transactions on Machine Learning Research decided to quiz a bunch of authors of already-rejected papers about their papers.
Of the ten submissions:
- Authors of one paper withdrew their submission.
- Authors of one paper said they were unavailable due to other commitments.
- Authors of one paper scheduled a meeting but did not show up.
- Authors of three papers were unable to answer basic questions about the paper.
- Authors of three papers answered questions about high-level ideas in the paper but had difficulty when asked further questions on technical details.
- Authors of one paper answered all of my questions (although I identified a major flaw in that paper).
Cheetahs are very very fast, this video is the best slow motion footage I’ve ever seen.
Relevant to my writing last month on Pontius Pilate, the miracle of the Báb, the founder of the Bábi religion, which perhaps inspired the Baháʼí Faith. The Báb was sentenced to death by firing squad by the Persians in 1850, and survived by a surprisingly well-attested miracle. Well, temporarily survived; he was killed by second firing squad several minutes later.
The amount of care Europeans, especially Brits and Germans, put into finding and defusing the WWII bombs they find during construction and roadwork has always impressed me. I was quite surprised the first time I saw a cordon around a block in Oxford due to a discovered bomb. This article about the British army team responsible for defusing is full of interesting details, including on insurance, which makes me think this is a less structured occasion than I’d supposed.
The next option was towing the dredger out to sea and blowing the whole thing up. Griffin, the marina’s compliance manager, phoned its insurers to ask whether this would be covered. Most marine policies carry an act-of-war exclusion, which raises a difficult question: after 80 years, is a Luftwaffe bomb still an act of war? “We went round in circles, really,” said Griffin.
“I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is the first sci-fi story that kept me up at night. Also related to Eliezer Yudkowsky’s recent “Can a Superintelligence do THAT”.
A story about finding one billion dollars in your basement, that you lost in 1993. Eric Gullichsen was an early advisor to Nvidia, who paid him with stock, much of which he had entirely forgotten about. Unfortunately, the lawyers involved did not go for the most fun possible outcome.
South Africa is the richest country in Africa, and the most unequal country in the world. These two facts combine for an interesting graph, when plotting income across racial groups.
Anders Sandberg, Swedish polymath and fascinating lunchguest, has recently put his blog temporarily offline, so I was checking to make sure it was well-archived. Here’s one of my favorites on weird probability distributions:
What are the weirdest probability distributions I have encountered? Probably the fractal synaptic distribution.
There is no shortage of probability distributions: over any measurable space you can define some function that sums to 1, and you have a probability distribution. Since the underlying space can be integers, rational numbers, real numbers, complex numbers, vectors, tensors, computer programs, or whatever, and the set of functions tends to be big (the power set of the underlying space) there is a lot of stuff out there.
If you look carefully through the flaps where you checked baggage comes out at SFO, you can still see tubs labeled “BAE,” which I didn’t know until this article about Denver’s debacle of a baggage handling system was unrelated to the British aerospace firm.
I heard about the drop in Russian bots after a Ukrainian drone strike hit a data center. It turned out to be ungrounded.
“We see no “dramatic drop” in traffic of Kremlin-aligned human trolls-for-hire targeting Russian domestic users (which we have been tracking for years),” wrote Antibot4Navalny, a group of anonymous researchers who track and respond to Russian disinformation.
I spent much of October on Malarone, which means that this is the first month in years that I remember all of my dreams. It was therefore one of the few times I could sympathize with this essay on dreaming.
Ending with a poem:
It is morning, Senlin says, and in the morning
When the light drips through the shutters like the dew,
I arise, I face the sunrise,
And do the things my fathers learned to do.
Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in a saffron mist and seem to die,
And I myself on a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie.
Vine leaves tap my window,
Dew-drops sing to the garden stones,
The robin chips in the chinaberry tree
Repeating three clear tones.
It is morning. I stand by the mirror
And tie my tie once more.
While waves far off in a pale rose twilight
Crash on a white sand shore.
I stand by a mirror and comb my hair:
How small and white my face!—
The green earth tilts through a sphere of air
And bathes in a flame of space.
There are houses hanging above the stars
And stars hung under a sea. . .
And a sun far off in a shell of silence
Dapples my walls for me. . .
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