stuff I’ve read in 2023

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This is just a grab bag. I’ve read two reasonably entertaining novels set in near futures where climate change is ravaging the world. Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock was the more entertaining of the two. Stephenson is a good storyteller and his books are easy to read. But obviously, read Snow Crash first if you never have.

I’m about half way through Ministry of the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Like all Robinson’s books I have read so far, this one is less entertaining but he does a good job of world building. I feel like he is trying too hard to educate me though – sometimes if I want to be educated I will go read a non-fiction book, and if I want to be entertained I will turn to fiction. Books that lie somewhere in between can be irritating.

I’ve enjoyed two mystery/action series this year. The Jack Reacher series is great escape fiction about your basic middle aged white male hero type who is good with guns and fighting, and fighting with guns. I hate violence in real life but it is hard to write entertaining stories with zero violence, so there. I don’t think I ever want to see the movie because I enjoy the book character too much. I’ve also been enjoying the Bernie Gunther series. This one is is bit dark and morally complex as it deals with a detective/policeman hero type who happens to be an involuntary reluctant Nazi. But seriously, it is good and recommended.

Speaking of dark and morally complex, I read a couple books by Octavia Butler – Kindred and Parable of the Sower. She subjects her characters to niceties like murder, rape, and slavery, and I guess you get to find out what they are made of when they respond to these situations. She is a good character developer and storyteller though and worth a read, as long as you are not already depressed going into it.

I read Dan Simmons’ Ilium and Olympos series, which is about Greek Gods, transhumans, Greek Gods who may be transhumans, robots, Shakespeare, Proust, and robots who like Shakespeare and Proust. This is pretty crazy stuff and you have to really like Dan Simmons to like it. I am liking but not loving it. I guess I would read the Hyperion series first, if you have not read any Dan Simmons.

Actually what prompted this post was a post by Charlie Stross (contains spoilers) about his Laundry Files and New Management Series. I gobbled up the new one that came out this year, Season of Skulls, because I gobble up all his stuff as soon as I can. It’s exciting to hear Charlie mention in this post that he has plans to wrap up the Laundry Files series with two more books “because his publisher insists”. (Could George R.R. Martin sign on with this particular publisher?) If you haven’t read any of these, I would go all the way back to the beginning of the Laundry Files, and enjoy!

most popular R books of 2023

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Here is something useful (to me, personally, and maybe too others), and thankfully not too pessimistic or morally fraught.

A Crash Course in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) using R – yes, please! We must end the tyranny of the monopolistic Environmental Systems “Research Institute”. Okay, they make some nice products, but just admit you are a rapacious for-profit corporation, please!

A ggplot2 Tutorial for Beautiful Plotting in R – Who doesn’t need to improve their data visualization and communication game?

“if there’s one thing we don’t want here in South America it’s war”

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This seems like a sensible quote from President Lula of Brazil. But countries that threaten to or actually nationalize lucrative industries controlled by U.S. based companies (Cuba, Iran, and Iraq come to mind) have a tendency to get invaded by the U.S. I know next to nothing about the politics of South America, but I do know the U.S. establishment has been itching for a fight with Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro for quite a while, so this seems like it would be a huge self-inflicted wound for a country already going through a lot of turmoil. And the world clearly does not need another war on another continent right now. Hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

sexiest people sorted by pronoun, 2023 edition

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The 2023 sexiest person of the year, somewhat obviously, is Taylor Swift, who is also the Time Person of the Year. I can’t argue with that too much, although I think it tells us something whether the person of the year comes from pop culture rather than than the serious worlds of, say, politics or science. At the moment, I think it tells us that we are burnt out on serious things and we want to stick our heads in the sand and ignore them.

Who would I pick, if I were going to pick someone from the serious world? That’s a tough one. I almost want to tip my hat to Jimmy Carter because we really need serious voices for peace in the world right now. But then again, Nobel Prize winners might not want to be greedy. I may have to keep thinking.

Meanwhile, it is mildly ironic that “People” magazine still names a sexiest “man”. I don’t really have a problem with this – People magazine doesn’t pretend to be about anything other than pop culture. And I still see men here and there every day despite the various endocrine disrupting compounds in our water and consumer products. This year’s sexist middle aged Caucasian actor I haven’t heard of is Patrick Dempsey. Congratulations, Patrick. I am sure you are awesome, it is just that I am not paying attention to your particular corner of pop culture. I note that you have a few gray hairs, so maybe my chances of being the sexiest man alive at some point in the future are not completely dead.

Q (the AI)

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“Q star” is very badly named, in my view, given the “Q anon” craze it has absolutely nothing to do with. Then again, the idea of an AI building an online cult with human followers does not seem all that far fetched.

Anyway, Gizmodo has an interesting article. Gizmodo does not restrict itself to traditional journalistic practices, such as articles free of profanity.

Some have speculated that the program might (because of its name) have something to do with Q-learning, a form of machine learning. So, yeah, what is Q-learning, and how might it apply to OpenAI’s secretive program? …

Finally, there’s reinforced learning, or RL, which is a category of ML that incentivizes an AI program to achieve a goal within a specific environment. Q-learning is a subcategory of reinforced learning. In RL, researchers treat AI agents sort of like a dog that they’re trying to train. Programs are “rewarded” if they take certain actions to affect certain outcomes and are penalized if they take others. In this way, the program is effectively “trained” to seek the most optimized outcome in a given situation. In Q-learning, the agent apparently works through trial and error to find the best way to go about achieving a goal it’s been programmed to pursue.

What does this all have to do with OpenAI’s supposed “math” breakthrough? One could speculate that the program that managed (allegedly) to do simple math operations may have arrived at that ability via some form of Q-related RL. All of this said, many experts are somewhat skeptical as to whether AI programs can actually do math problems yet. Others seem to think that, even if an AI could accomplish such goals, it wouldn’t necessarily translate to broader AGI breakthroughs.

Gizmodo

My sense is that AI breakthroughs are certainly happening. At the same time, I suspect the commercial hype has gotten ahead of the technology, just like it did for every previous technology from self-driving cars to virtual reality to augmented reality. Every one of these technologies reached a fever pitch where companies were racing to roll out products to consumers ahead of competitors. Because they rush, the consumer applications don’t quite live up to the hype, the hype bubble bursts, and then the technology seems to disappear for a few years. Of course, it doesn’t disappear at all, but rather disappears from headlines and advertisements for a while. Behind the scenes, it continues to progress and then slowly seeps back into our lives. As the real commercial applications arrive and take over our daily lives, we tend to shrug.

So I would keep an eye out on the street for the technologies whose hype bubbles burst a handful of years ago, and I would expect the current AI hype to follow a similar trend. Look for the true AI takeover in the late 2020s (if I remember correctly, close to when when Ray Kurzweil predicted 30-odd years ago???)

The Sierra Madre

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This is a weird story. In the South China Sea, there is a Philippines ship that ran aground on a shoal in 1999. Sailors from that country have occupied the ship ever since, and are regularly resupplied while being bombarded by the Chinese navy using things other than guns, like water cannons and lasers.

That month, the Sierra Madre ran aground at Second Thomas Shoal, a small reef in what was then disputed territory, about 120 miles off the coast of Palawan island. A second ship did the same at another shoal later that year. Beijing suspected that Manila was using the beached ships to create outposts.

Philippine officials initially played coy, saying that they meant to repair the Sierra Madre but were having trouble finding the materials, while the other ship was eventually towed away. Yet, more than two decades later, the Sierra Madre remains grounded, a rusted dieselpunk monolith interrupting an otherwise pristine swath of tropical waters. A small group of sailors crews it; they pick their way through its slightly listing steel skeleton as they monitor the area for incursions. Their rotations generally last two months but can stretch up to five. Carlos referred to these tours as a “test of sanity…”

Beijing blatantly ignores this ruling. When the Philippines delivers supplies for the sailors on board the Sierra Madre via small boats escorted by coast-guard ships, Chinese ships attempt to block them. In early August, the Chinese coast guard used water cannons to prevent Philippine boats from reaching the outpost. A second attempt later that month was successful, as was one in September, when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft flew overhead.

Atlantic

The U.S., of course, feels the need to get involved in all this. Not by being a voice of reason, but by ramping up tensions and threats of violence.

new CDC Covid dashboard

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CDC has released a new wastewater monitoring dashboard, according to Forbes, which oddly does not link to the new dashboard or even tell us the name of it so it would be easy to find. Wastewater monitoring to me seems like a very useful tool in the toolbox to monitor public health and diseases of concern, whether common or exotic, well known or emerging.

“useful principles”

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Here is an interesting blog post called “30 useful principles“. I would agree that the majority of them are useful. Anyway, here are a few ideas and phrases that caught my interest. I’ll try to be clear when I am quoting versus paraphrasing or adding my own interpretation.

  • “When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure.” Makes sense to me – measuring is necessary, but I have found that people who are actually doing things on the ground need an understanding of the fundamental goals, or else things will tend to drift over time and no longer be aimed at the fundamental goals.
  • “A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.” A good way to talk about the communication of uncertainty. Measuring and understanding uncertainty is critical in science and decision making, but how we communicate it requires a lot of careful thought to avoid unintended consequences. Decisions are often about playing the odds, and sometimes giving decision makers too much information on uncertainty leads to no decisions or delayed decisions, which are themselves a type of decision, and not the type that is likely to produce desirable results. Am I saying we should oversimplify and project an inflated sense of certainty when talking to the public and decision makers? and is this a form of manipulation? Well, sort of and sometimes yes to both these questions.
  • “Reading is the basis of thought.” Yes, this is certainly true for me, and it is even true that the writing process is an important part of thoroughly thinking something through. This is why we may be able to outsource the production of words to AI, but this will not be a substitute for humans thinking. And if we don’t exercise our thinking muscles, we will lose them over time and we will forget how to train the next generation to develop them. So if we are going to outsource thinking and problem solving to computers, let’s hope they will be better at it than we ever were. A better model would be computer-aided decision making, where the computers are giving humans accurate and timely information about the likely consequences of our decisions, but in the end we are still applying our judgment and values in making those decisions.
  • “punishing speech—whether by taking offence or by threatening censorship—is ultimately a request to be deceived.” It’s a good idea to create incentives for people to tell the truth and provide accurate information, even if it is information people in leadership positions don’t want to hear. Leaders get very out of touch if they don’t do this.
  • “Cynicism is not a sign of intelligence but a substitute for it, a way to shield oneself from betrayal & disappointment without having to do or think.” I don’t know that cynical or “realistic” people lack raw intelligence on average, but they certainly lack imagination and creativity. The more people have trouble imagining that things can change, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that things will not change.
  • “One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.” I’m as horrified by pictures of dying babies in a hospital in a war zone as anyone else, but it also raises my propaganda flag. Who is trying to manipulate me with these images and why? What else is going on at the same time that I might also want to pay attention to?

Taiwan’s 2024 election

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There is an important election taking place in 2024 that affects people far beyond the borders of the country where it takes place. I’m talking, of course, about Taiwan. Well, the three (?) sides don’t even agree on what the borders of the country are, so we could start there.

Far be it from me to express any opinions about the politics of Taiwan. But it is worth watching because it affects relations between Taiwan and (Peoples Republic of) China, and this potentially affects everyone. The idea of a full-frontal invasion of Taiwan has always seemed far-fetched to me. It seems more likely to me that there would be some form of subversion, election interference (like we saw BOTH the U.S. and Russia do in Ukraine), confusion about who is in charge, shadowy paramilitary forces (Russia in Ukraine), etc.

I’ve always thought Taiwan must have the best counter-intelligence in the world. It must be a bit like Cold War Germany, where the two antagonist sides basically look identical and speak the same language. Only there is a lot of economic interaction, free information flow, at least some travel, and the two sides are not as far apart culturally as, say, Cold Water era Germany and today’s North and South Korea. (In the latter case, the two sides might look and speak similarly, the comparison ends there – certainly no free flow of information, travel, and very little economic interaction, so it is hard to imagine how North Korea could place spies effectively in South Korea). So how does Taiwan manage to secure its elections and keep its government from being a nest of spies? But somehow, they seem to manage this on an ongoing basis.

Project Censored Top 25

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You should buy Project Censored’s new book or otherwise support them if you can. And having said that, they appear to have posted their top 25 “most censored” stories of 2023 on RSS. Here are a few that caught my eye:

  • #22: Agricultural industry’s continued heavy use of antibiotics linked antibiotic resistance concerns in humans
  • #21: A lot of homeless people actually do some sort of paid work.
  • #19: One study estimated economic costs of gun violence in the U.S. at $557 billion per year. It may seem callous to “put a price on human life” this way, but hard nosed cost-benefit analysis can sometimes help justify better policy decisions, as it has for seat belts and air pollution controls, for example.
  • #16: Sixteen municipalities in Puerto Rico are suing fossil fuel giants under racketeering statutes for intentionally misleading the public about the causes of climate change. And #14: And it’s not just oil and gas companies – the electric industry was also very much in on the lies and cover ups that have altered our biosphere beyond the point of return over the past half century.
  • #15: In the U.S., data show black people are wrongfully convicted of murder about seven times more often than white people.
  • #5: The idea of buying carbon offsets to offset travel or other emissions-producing activities seems very attractive, but unfortunately, the objective evidence does not show them to be anywhere near as effective as advertised.