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It’s a busy season, so we’ll keep this short. Next month brings my annual gift guide, for which I’ve been squir­reling ideas all year.

As usual, this newsletter has a few dis­tinct parts. Here’s what’s ahead:

• Work news: OOF!

• The book from the bog: a defense of moder­nity

• Links and rec­om­mendations: sci­ence-y

The skronk of the malaxer

This week, the olive har­vest commences. Here in the Fat Gold mill, the crusher blades are ready to spin … 

 … and we’ve been rewatching Star Trek: Voyager, so of course the malaxers sud­denly seem to evoke reactor cores:

Lately, our work has been enlivened by a sur­prising example of cross-media adaptation. The skronky post-punk trio called OOF was inspired by a Fat Gold zine to write and per­form a song titled … Fat Gold?!

It’s part of their new album and it’s wonderful — simultaneously a tour of the olive mill and a med­i­ta­tion on civilization. It is also, as promised: skronky.

If you ever need a refresher on olive oil production, listen to these lyrics:

The malaxer
A tank
Where the paste will wait
Waiting for the oil
To find its mate
The malaxer
Leans in
To the class divide
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When trapped inside

Has the word “malaxer” ever before been used in music? I am bet­ting it has not.

I bought the cas­sette tape to play in my car and I’m glad, because it prompted me to listen to the album straight through, which, if I’m being honest, I might never have done on my laptop.

What hap­pened (and this always presages a good expe­ri­ence with art) was that I sur­ren­dered to the strange­ness, and the strange­ness started to make sense. I entered OOF’s world, rather than insisting the band fit into mine, which is, of course, the demand of the Spo­tify playlist.

You’ve got to give things a chance. You’ve got to let them seep into your brain. It takes time! I have spoken, often, of the dream-state that makes fic­tion work. It’s like an energy field, and it cannot, will not, simply snap into place; it eases in, just as sleep does, as dreams do.

OOF does not seem, to me, a band made for Spo­tify playlists. It seems a band made for cas­sette tapes in the car — for the decision, snap-thunk-whir, to give them a chance, and the slow but sure sur­render to the dream of their world.

The book from the bog

I learned recently about the Faddan More Psalter: a book of psalms, deposited in an Irish bog around the year 800, dis­cov­ered by chance in 2006. When the book emerged, it looked some­thing like this:

If it was me, I’d have said, wow, what a find. Too bad it’s such a wreck. Anyway!

But of course, I am not an archaeologist, and I am not a conservator.

From the Guardian:

The process of sta­bil­ising the book out­side the bog, drying it and then unpicking and unfolding pages where pos­sible was painstaking. Archae­ol­o­gists placed the “conglomeration” of squashed pages, leather and turf in a walk-in cold store in the museum at 4 degrees C. But there was no manual in the world to guide [conservator John] Gillis on how to go about the task.

“I spent the first three months retrieving the mass from the fridge, bringing it up to my lab and just staring at it, trying to make sense of it before I could start any sort of inter­ven­tion work. Because once you dis­turb it, you are in effect losing evidence,” Gillis said.

What occurred at the National Museum of Ire­land over the next decade (!) was a pro­found project of preservation, reassembly, and — I think it’s fair to say — extremely close reading. The word “painstaking”, above, doesn’t go nearly far enough. Imagine a liquid jigsaw puzzle, the pieces all tiny scraps of paper, most of them missing. Like — what?? I watched this talk by John Gillis, who did most of the puzzling, with total astonishment.

Work of this kind is an act of pro­found respect for the past, and, implicitly, of faith in the future. Is it “worth it”? Not by any rea­son­able eco­nomic measure, and the psalter’s con­tent isn’t that his­tor­i­cally inter­esting, either. There is no “worth it” here. The logic, IMHO, is ritual. You do it because you ought to do it.

The sec­ular world gets crit­i­cized for its destruc­tion, its disenchantment … but look at this reverence, this care. Come back to me with your crit­i­cism of the modern after you’ve put a book together, one wet letter at a time.

Recall that back in 2021, I exclaimed: “The bog lover has logged on!” Readers of Moonbound know the cen­tral role of the bog in that story. You are always get­ting a rich pre­view in these newsletters, whether you realize it or not … 

Links and recommendations

Here is a sprawling package, glorious, from Quanta Magazine: The Unrav­eling of Space-Time! I enjoyed all of it, but my favorite part was an essay with the evoca­tive title: John Wheeler Saw the Tear in Reality.

I also appre­ci­ated this set of thought experiments.

I believe it was a ques­tion sparked by the Quanta package that led me Angela Collier’s video explaining antimatter, and the rest of her channel in turn. Her mix of crunchy numeracy and casual snark is totally winning.

In particular, I like the videos where she solves a math problem step by step. When I do math these days, it’s on a com­puter, so it’s novel, even a bit thrilling, to see her work things out by hand.

Here’s a newsletter that touches on “sleeping beauties”: sci­en­tific ideas that “languish in obscu­rity before even­tu­ally gaining recognition” and being put to use.

(Scope of Work is a ter­rific newsletter — about the phys­ical world, broadly, with a spe­cial interest in man­u­fac­turing and infrastructure.)

Here is Georgia Ray on the chal­lenge of studying tiny life:

The thing about micro­bi­ology is that it’s really, really easy to miss.

I love Georgia’s writing at her delightfully-named Eukaryote Writes Blog.

Linda Liukas built a play­ground!

Any code I’ve written, any glib dig­ital creation, dis­ap­pears into the infi­nite feed. But a play­ground will stub­bornly stand for the next twenty years, pointing to big ideas in com­puter sci­ence.

Here’s Joanne McNeil lis­tening to an old radio broad­cast:

For my research, I read and watched and lis­tened to just about every early inter­view with William Gibson that I could find. One of the inter­views — a radio broad­cast — stood out. The host was R. P. Bird, a broad­caster in Wichita, Kansas in 1987 and you can listen to the incred­ibly trans­portive audio on the Internet Archive. I was lis­tening while I was washing dishes in my apart­ment on a quiet Sunday night, in 2024, of course, but I kept thinking what it must have been like, to be dri­ving around Wichita in 1987 and turning radio dial through static before landing on this mind-blowing con­ver­sa­tion between two people who sound thoughtful and kind.

This made me think of my own expe­ri­ence lis­tening to the full recording of KPFA’s Brian Eno Day, broad­cast in 1988, which I wrote about here. I’m going to have to do that again sometime.

The saga of the AI safety bill in California, con­cluded for now with its veto by the governor, was inter­esting to follow … but/and I mostly want to say, that’s a solid signature! The G like a clipper ship surging across the waves of avin … 

Here’s Mandy Brown with a cri de coeur that explains why those of us with web­sites still bother:

A web­site is, among other things, a con­tainer. The shape of that con­tainer both con­strains and makes pos­sible what goes within it. This is, I think, one of the pri­mary jus­ti­fi­ca­tions for having your own web­site. Not just so you can own your stuff (for some meaning of “ownership,” in a cul­ture in which any bil­lion­aire can scrape your work without per­mis­sion and copy­right only pro­tects the rich). Not just so you have a home base among the shifting winds of the var­ious platforms, which rise and fall like brush before the fire. Not just so you can avoid set­ting up camp in a Nazi bar. But also so that you can shape the work — so that you can give shape to it, and in that shaping make pos­sible work that couldn’t arise elsewhere.

I updated the head­line font on my web­site: I’m still using AT Kyrios, but I’ve switched to one of the new weights, slightly heavier. I’m really in love with this font — I can imagine using the text weight for some­thing.

Arrow Type’s other offer­ings are ter­rific, too. I like the look of Lang.

Making the bomb, seeing the future

AI is often analo­gized to the atomic bomb, for the fraugh­t­ness of its development, its richly dual use.

Recently, I read The Making of the Atomic Bomb, the great his­tory by Richard Rhodes, and I dis­cov­ered that this analogy isn’t very useful at all.

In the book’s opening chapters, the gal­loping pageant of ideas is a thrill to follow; I wonder if it has ever quite been matched, anywhere, anytime. Then, the work changes phase, sci­ence into engi­neering, and the book becomes a horror story.

That’s also where the analogy fails.

First: at the outset of the Man­hattan Project, the nuclear physics at the bomb’s heart was basi­cally understood. The project was an enor­mous engi­neering chal­lenge, one that required pro­found invention … but the sci­ence worked exactly as the sci­en­tists expected. Theory led the way.

Com­pare this to AI, which neatly inverts the picture: the engi­neering (of data­bases and datacenters, apps and APIs, all the rest) is working as expected, while the sci­ence remains mysterious. There is, shall we say, a paucity of theory. (Is this theory? I don’t think so; it’s all “what”, without any “why”.)

No one knows how the new AI sys­tems do what they do — but that’s been well-documented, remains much-discussed. Here is what really sur­prised me:

Again and again in Rhodes’s retelling, the sci­en­tists see, with almost per­fect clarity, the impli­ca­tions of what they are engi­neering, and the shape of things to come.

There were many of these clairvoyants. The most famous is Niels Bohr, who, in con­tem­po­ra­neous memos, laid out the whole arc of the 20th century.

“They didn’t need my help in making the atom bomb,” Bohr later told a friend. He was there to another purpose. He had left his wife and chil­dren and work and trav­eled in lone­li­ness to America for the same reason he had hur­ried to Stock­holm in a dark time to see the King: to bear witness, to clarify, to win change, finally to rescue. His rev­e­la­tion — which was equiv­a­lent, as Oppen­heimer said, to his rev­e­la­tion when he learned of Rutherford’s dis­covery of the nucleus — was a vision of the com­ple­men­tarity of the bomb. In London and at Los Alamos Bohr was working out its rev­o­lu­tionary consequences. He meant now to com­mu­ni­cate his rev­e­la­tion to the heads of state who might act on it: to Franklin Roo­sevelt and Win­ston Churchill first of all.

His­tory shows that Bohr’s analysis was essen­tially correct.

The weapon devised as an instru­ment of major war would end major war. It was hardly a weapon at all, the mem­o­randum Bohr was writing in swel­tering Wash­ington emphasized; it was “a far deeper inter­fer­ence with the nat­ural course of events than any­thing ever before attempted” and it would “completely change all future con­di­tions of warfare.” When nuclear weapons spread to other countries, as they cer­tainly would, no one would be able any longer to win. A spasm of mutual destruc­tion would be pos­sible. But not war.

There’s no equiv­a­lent insight among the emi­nences of AI; there is no clair­voy­ance anywhere. This great race is char­ac­ter­ized instead by total dis­agree­ment and con­fu­sion about what will happen next, and how fast.

Even if it’s no guide to AI, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is still the skeleton key to the whole 20th century, and a basi­cally per­fect book. I rec­om­mend it totally and urgently.

I dis­cov­ered these ghostly air­brushed (!) moon-maps through Jen­nifer Roberts. Miranda’s goopy gleam, up at the top, is what hooked me — isn’t it almost H. R. Giger-esque?

Jen­nifer writes, in part:

The moons of Uranus are named after char­ac­ters in Shake­speare and Alexander Pope, mostly faeries and sprites and elves and sylphs. Which seems about right, since there is some­thing lim­inal about these maps, living as they do in the space between light and dark, reason and dream. The moons don’t quite assent to being caught in the cartographer’s net; they refuse to appear or conform, with­drawn behind cloaks of rock with van­ishing fringes.

The story of how these maps were pro­duced is inter­esting, but you’ll have to go look at Jen­nifer’s post for that, and I’ll remind you that she is the best follow on Instagram.

Here’s your cor­re­spon­dent at work:

From the San Joaquin Valley,

Robin

P.S. You’ll receive my next newsletter in mid-November — my 2024 gift guide!

October 2024