2023
Thousands of papers seized from Spanish ships during the 18th Century are now online. The letters are from and to ordinary sailors, revealing details of daily life from that time.
The correspondence was seized by the British during wars in the 1700s, and is being published by British researchers.
“My dear beloved husband I will celebrate that this letter has reach[ed] your hands and finds you with the perfect health that I wish for myself," [writes Francisca Muñoz in Seville to her husband, Miguel Atocha, in Mexico on 22 January 1747/]. “I would like to know the reason why I did not receive any response to the 13 letters I sent to you; I would like to know if perhaps over there [there] is no paper or pen or ink not to have written even a letter…. “
Kvetch kvetch kvetch. But Francisca is just getting wound up.
Serious questions: At what point do rights of privacy end? If these people were alive, it would be a crime to publish their private letters. Do rights of privacy end at death? Even after 300 years, should these papers continue to be kept private?
Everybody who was Anybody had Dr. Feelgood and his Speed Shots on Speed Dial
Dr. Max Jacobson, aka “Dr. Feelgood,” injected amphetamine-based concoctions into the arms of celebrities and powerful people including JFK, Alfred Hitchcock, Truman Capote, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe and more.
Capote described the “vitamin shots” as “instant euphoria.”
Messy Nessy Chic quotes Capote:
You feel like Superman. You’re flying. Ideas come at the speed of light. You go seventy-two hours straight without so much as a coffee break. You don’t need sleep, you don’t need nourishment. If it’s sex you’re after, you go all night. Then you crash – it’s like falling down a well, like parachuting without a parachute. You want to hold onto something and there’s nothing out there but air.
On the Our Opinions Are Correct podcast: While robots and self-driving cars get all the attention, four mundane technologies have the potential to change the future: Artificial wombs, smart toilets, new forms of public transportation and new cleaning machines.
… the Court felt that bringing the chicken into the courtroom to play tic-tac-toe would degrade the dignity of the Court. I thought that the dignity of the Court was degraded by executing a mentally-ill person.
— This American Life. Poultry Slam
The real AI fight
Last week’s spectacular OpenAI fight was reportedly a donnybrook between “Effective Altruism” and “Effective Accelarationism”—two schools of philosophy founded on the nonsensical faith, absent any evidence, that godlike artificial intelligence (AI) beings are imminent, and arguing over the best way to prepare for that day.
Cory Doctorow:
This “AI debate” is pretty stupid, proceeding as it does from the foregone conclusion that adding compute power and data to the next-word-predictor program will eventually create a conscious being, which will then inevitably become a superbeing. This is a proposition akin to the idea that if we keep breeding faster and faster horses, we’ll get a locomotive….
But for people who don’t take any of this mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics seriously, these two sides are nearly indistinguishable, sharing as they do this extremely weird belief. The fact that they’ve split into warring factions on its particulars is less important than their unified belief in the certain coming of the paperclip-maximizing apocalypse….
Pluralistic: The real AI fight
Left out of this argument are the real abuses of artificial intelligence and automation today, which (Cory says, quoting Molly White) “is incredibly convenient for the powerful individuals and companies who stand to profit from AI.”
AI and automation can be used for a great deal of good and a great deal of evil—and it already is being used for both, Cory says. We need to focus the discussion on that.
Like Cory, I think it’s entirely possible that we may achieve human-level AI one day, and that AI might become superintelligent. That might happen today, it might happen in a thousand years, it might never happen at all. The human race has other things to worry about now.
The Pneumatic Tube Mail System in New York City
… the first cylinder tube to travel through the New York City system contained “a Bible, a flag and a copy of the Constitution. The second contained an imitation peach in honor of Senator Chauncy Depew (He was fondly known as “The Peach”). A third carrier had a black cat in it, for reasons unknown.”
Residents of North Sentinel Island off India are one of the few surviving tribes that resist contact with the outside world. When a missionary successfully contacted them in 2018, in violation of international law, they killed him brutally.
Turns out they (or their neighbors) were in contact with the outside world previously—a Victorian English adventurer—and it went badly for them, tragically and unsurprisingly.
Placebos are effective treatments for many conditions, such as chronic pain. They work even when the patient is aware they are receiving a placebo, according to a leading researcher in placebo studies.
In other news, “placebo studies” is a thing.
An ode to ‘Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast’. “… if you want to understand the man behind the squinty eyes, listen to the 600-plus episodes of ‘Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast,’ one of the great love letters to twentieth century Hollywood.”
Microcelebrity in 2007
Writing in 2007, Clive Thompson describes the phenomenon of “microcelebrity”–how blogging, Facebook and Flickr makes people famous to a few fans. “Adapting to microcelebrity means learning to manage our own identity and ‘message’ almost like a self-contained public relations department.” Clive Thompson on the Age of Microcelebrity: Why Everyone’s a Little Brad Pitt | WIRED
Microcelebrities were still uncommon back then, but now everybody who’s active on social media is a microcelebrity, even if it’s just posting family photos to instagram.
Thompson was writing then about blogging and Flickr. Facebook and Twitter were not yet mainstream (arguably, Twitter never was). Now it’s Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. More widespread but still the same phenomenon.
Moving furniture on the blog
I’m moving furniture around on the blog again (metaphorically speaking). The main visible change: No more ephemera posts here—they’re additional fuss for me and I don’t think many people are reading them.
You can find the memes and other found media on my tumblr, Mastodon, Facebook, Bluesky, Threads and my newsletter.
Problems vs. situations: When facing a problem, ask yourself “is it a problem or a situation? Problems, by definition, have solutions. You might not like the cost of the solution, the trade-offs it leads to, or the time and effort it takes, but problems have solutions. On the other hand, situations don’t. Situations are simply things we need to live with.” Excellent life advice from Seth Godin. Working with problems
“If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?” Outstanding productivity advice from Tim Ferriss.
Feynman stories, Richard Feynman and scientism
A “Feynman story” is “any anecdote that someone tells that is structured so that the teller comes off as a genius and everyone else in the story comes off as an idiot.
“[Many people] seemed to think Feynman was a great guy…. [many] other people didn’t think he was so great. So Feynman seems like a standard case of a guy who was nice to some people and a jerk to others.”
Also:
Feynman couldn’t see the value of something like sociology because intellectually he was prone to extreme scientism – to the view that forms of knowledge that can’t be pursued exclusively via the methods of the natural sciences aren’t real knowledge. The ironic paradox here is that someone who has any grasp of the sociology of knowledge would immediately recognize that this idea – a very common one in our contemporary intellectual culture – is false, and in a very socially pernicious way, as can be seen in contemporary attempts to defund the humanities and social sciences.
Richard Feynman was a brilliant physicist, raconteur, teacher and popularizer. But he was only human.
Lawyers, Guns & Money: Feynman, pedagogy, and the two cultures -
“Avoid situations that someone you love might later have to explain on a medical or government form.”
Merlin Mann has been collecting life lessons in a lengthy bullet list on GitHub.
Some more gems:
- Minimize the number of conversations you have through a closed bathroom door. Unless you’re outside the door and there’s a fire, or you’re inside the door and you’re out of toilet paper. Otherwise, have a little dignity, and wait for the door to open.
- Your refrigerator is not a library or a hope chest. So, if you decide to save some leftovers, write the current day of the week on them. Then, when you rediscover your treat 3-5 weeks from now and wonder “Now, which Sunday was that?” Yeah. Time to deeply curate your odd little food museum.
- Remember that, like babies and balls, you can bounce. The extent to which any given event—often an imagined event—might derail or even destroy you is, at least in small ways, still something that’s in your control. Especially when you remember that you can bounce.
- As you get older, you will increasingly fear losing power, and you will become bitter, defensive, and angry about change. Curiosity, acceptance, and exposure to new people can help with this. But, man are you ever going to get weird about people with purple hair who are not afraid of you.
- Related: almost no one has ever actually been afraid of you.
- Relatedly related: the only people who were ever actually afraid of you were the handful of people who loved you and desperately wanted you to love them back.
- If the soap in a guest bathroom is new and shaped like anything besides a bar of soap, do not use it. Also, do not eat it. Because I know you kinda want to. Especially those shiny little sea shells.
- … if you really want to help someone, offer something extremely specific. “I’m here for you! 😬👍” is not nearly as cool as “Can I drop off a lasagna at 4?”
- Whenever your first solution to a problem feels like it should involve buying something plastic at The Container Store, consider a second solution.
- Try to save some parts of your life to be just for you. Including some special things that you’re happy about or are even a little proud of. If your only private things are shameful things, you will become very sad and will eventually despise your own company.
- Maybe almost never say anything about how someone looks ever.
- Related: if you are commenting on how someone looks, only ever compliment them on a thing that they have chosen.
- Relatedly related: but, yeah, maybe still almost never say anything about how someone looks ever.
- Never argue on the internet. No one will remember whether you won or lost the argument; they’ll just remember that you are the sort of person who argues on the internet.
What Old Age Is Really Like. Writer Ceridwen Dovey discusses the role of the very old in society, literature and lived experience, and talks with very old writers.
Are Men Obsessed With the Roman Empire? “In posts shared on social media, women have been asking the men in their lives how often they think about ancient Rome. ‘Constantly,’ one husband responded. ‘Like, every day,’ said a boyfriend. As of Thursday night, a thread on X, formerly known as Twitter, went on like this for MDCLXXIX messages.”