Links and Thoughts (Feb '24)
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See (6) for an important announcement from Seeds of Science and a note on how you can support my work.
1. Footage from the Wings of Desire (1987) over the song “Hey, Who Really Cares” (1970) by Linda Perhacs from Bueno Film (sadly, now inactive), courtesy of reader Plod Ibre (blog).
Hauntingly beautiful.
Also love this one—footage from Breathless (1960) by Jean-Luc Godard over “Time Moves Slow” by BADBADNOTGOOD ft. Samuel T. Herring
2. The origin of the phrase “tree hugger” is a lot more hardcore than you’d expect given its current connotations.
The Khejarli massacre occurred in September 1730 in Northern India, when 363 Bishnois were killed while trying to peacefully protect a grove of sacred Khejri trees.
In 1726, Abhai Singh of Marwar gained control of the village of Khejarli and Abhai Singh of Marwar granted the estate of Khejarli to Thakur Surat Singh. In 1730, he dispatched one of his ministers, Giridhar Bhandari, to collect wood to be used in the construction of a new palace. Bhandari and his entourage of soldiers arrived in Jehnad, where they demanded access to the village’s trees. Led by a woman named Amrita Devi Bishnoi, the villagers refused to surrender their trees to the Raj's soldiers. Amrita stated that the Khejri trees were sacred to the Bishnois, and her faith prohibited her from allowing the trees to be cut down.
The situation escalated and the Marwan party offered to leave the village's Khejri trees alone in exchange for a bribe. However, this was seen as a grievous insult to the Bishnoi values, and Amrita announced that she would rather die than to allow the trees to be cut down. She and her family began hugging the Khejris, shielding the trees with their bodies. Angered by the rebuke, the Marwans beheaded Amrita and three of her daughters before beginning to cut down the trees. Amrita’s last words were recorded as being “A chopped head is cheaper than a chopped tree”, and this couplet later became a rallying cry for the Bishnois.
News of the ongoing desecration of Jehnad’s trees quickly spread among Rajasthan’s Bishnoi population. In all, Bishnois from 83 villages began to travel to Jehnad in an attempt to save the trees, and a council was convened to determine what could be done about the situation. The council’s decision was that each Bishnoi volunteer would lay down their life to defend one of the threatened trees. Older people went forward first, with many of them being killed as they hugged the Khejris. Seeing this as an opportunity, Giridhar Bhandari claimed that the Bishnoi were only sending forward people whom they thought were useless to be killed. In response, younger men, women, and children began to hug the trees, resulting in many of them being killed as well. In all, 363 Bishnois were killed while protecting the trees.
Shocked by the passive resistance of the Bishnois, Abhai Singh recalled his men and personally traveled to the village to apologize for his minister's actions. He decreed that the village would never again be compelled to provide wood for the kingdom.
3. Word of the day:
Cacoethes - an irresistible urge to do something inadvisable.
“Kelsey had a cacoethes for pulling pranks at church.”
4. Quote of the month:
“Thought and sex are the only human activities which are not totally ridiculous” (Jacques Vallée)
5. Every problem you don’t think about is worse than you think it is.
“The Improvement Default: People Presume Improvement When Lacking Information” (Hillman et al., 2023)
People erroneously think that things they know little about improve over time. We propose that, due to salient cultural narratives, improvement is a highly accessible expectation that leads people to presume improvement in the absence of diagnostic information. Five studies investigated an improvement default: a general tendency to presume improvement even in self-irrelevant domains. Participants erroneously presumed improvement over esoteric historical time periods associated with decline (Study 1). Participants arranged a stranger’s experiences to produce trends of improvement (Study 2). Participants presumed improvement for a fictional city when given no diagnostic information about it (Study 3). Finally, participants who perceived more past improvement were less supportive of policies that may precipitate further improvement (Study 4). Implications for consequences, such as complacency toward improving inequality, are discussed.
6. An announcement from Seeds of Science:
Science needs a “third space” for science beyond academia and industry.
Seeds of Science is launching a new initiative, the SoS Research Collective, a first-of-its-kind virtual research organization for supporting independent researchers (and academics thinking independently). You can read the announcement post to learn more about the motivation, philosophy, and structure of the Collective, but in brief we would like to offer researchers the following:
A title (SoS Research Fellow) and dedicated profile page
Payment of $50 per peer-reviewed article publishing in our journal
Editing and advising services
Promotion of your work on the SoS Substack.
Anyone conducting independent research (including undergraduate or graduate students conducting research activities outside of their primary academic work) who feels that they might benefit from being a SoS research fellow is welcome to apply. To apply, shoot us an email that tells us who you are and what your research is about—CV, website, blog, twitter, etc.—and we will go from there (info@theseedsofscience.org).
As I’ve said before, “I do not charge for any of this sizzling hot content and I never will. Paywalls cannot and should not contain the Bacon; Bacon is for the people, by the people”.
But the SoS Research Collective is going to cost money, and while I personally don’t need your filthy money, Seeds of Science would greatly appreciate it. So, if you’d like to support my work—the silly essays that I write, these links posts, all of the editing, curating, promotion, and recruitment I do for the the SoS journal and now the Collective—then there are two ways you can donate to the cause:
A paid subscription to the Seeds of Science Substack (see below for a list of most recent “Best of Science Blogging” posts).
What does a paid subscription get you?
Seeds of Science was lucky enough to receive a small but generous grant from Scott Alexander’s ACX grants about two years ago. Prior to this funding, we were self-funded by the founding team, and while we were/are technically a business enterprise, there were no plans for bringing in revenue (we joked that we weren’t a non-profit but a "no-profit). Now with this new venture and the author fees that we hope to pay our research fellows, we anticipate the grant money will run out some time this year and we will have to go back to the no-profit model.
So that’s why we are now offering paid subscriptions to this Substack. Here’s the rub though—putting ideas (i.e. seeds of science) behind a paywall is sort of against our whole philosophy. So we aren’t going to do that. So what is a paid subscription getting you then? The sheer bliss that comes with knowing you are one of the good guys, that you stand on the right side of history, that your descendents will smile upon your deeds. What I’m really trying to say is that a subscription is really just a donation.
As far as non-financial ways of supporting us (we know all you students and early-career researchers reading this are just ROLLING in the dough), the first thing you can do is spread the word by sharing this post (and the journal) with your friends, family, colleagues, lovers, haters, etc. The second thing you can do is repeatedly shout SEEDS OF SCIENCE at the top of your lungs from the nearest mountaintop. Beyond that, we'd love to hear from anyone who is interested in what we're doing and would like to get involved or help in some way (we can imagine a few roles that might be of interest to some).
One more thing: I’m also available for podcast appearances to discuss my work with SoS or my writing or whatever weird shit you freaks want to talk about.
7. Recent posts from the “Best of Science Blogging” feed on the SoS Substack:
Amateur Hour: a thinking guide for independent researchers (and academics thinking independently)
Taxonomies of Intelligence: A Comprehensive Guide to the Universe of Minds
The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications
"Diamondoid bacteria" nanobots: deadly threat or dead-end? A nanotech investigation
Crazy Science Idea: Tell People Something Is Possible When You Actually Have No Clue
8. This blue man group:
9. Two of my favorite pseudo-historical conspiracy theories:
The “New Chronology” of Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko:
The New Chronology is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory proposed by Anatoly Fomenko who argues that events of antiquity generally attributed to the ancient civilizations of Rome, Greece and Egypt actually occurred during the Middle Ages, more than a thousand years later.
Central to Fomenko’s new chronology is his claim of the existence of a vast Slav-Turk empire, called the "Russian Horde", which played a dominant role in Eurasian history before the 17th century. The various peoples identified in ancient and medieval history, from the Scythians, Huns, Goths and Bulgars, through the Polans, Dulebes, Drevlians and Pechenegs, to in more recent times, the Cossacks, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, are nothing but elements of the single Russian Horde.
Fomenko claims that the most probable prototype of the historical Jesus was Andronikos I Komnenos (allegedly AD 1152 to 1185), the emperor of Byzantium, known for his failed reforms, his traits and deeds reflected in 'biographies' of many real and imaginary persons.[18] The historical Jesus is a composite figure and reflection of the Old-Testament prophet Elisha (850–800 BC?), Pope Gregory VII (1020?–1085), Saint Basil of Caesarea (330–379), and even Li Yuanhao (also known as Emperor Jingzong or “Son of Heaven”, emperor of Western Xia, who reigned in 1032–1048), Euclides, Bacchus and Dionysius. Fomenko explains the seemingly vast differences in the biographies of these figures as resulting from difference in languages, points of view and time-frame of the authors of said accounts and biographies. He claims that the historical Jesus was born in Cape Fiolent, Crimea, on December 25, 1152 A.D. and was crucified on March 20, 1185 A.D., on Joshua’s Hill, overlooking the Bosphorus.
And the Phantom Time Conspiracy Theory:
The phantom time conspiracy theory is a pseudohistorical conspiracy theory first asserted by Heribert Illig in 1991. It hypothesizes a conspiracy by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II, and possibly the Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII, to fabricate the Anno Domini dating system retroactively, in order to place them at the special year of AD 1000, and to rewrite history to legitimize Otto's claim to the Holy Roman Empire. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation and forgery of documentary and physical evidence. According to this scenario, the entire Carolingian period, including the figure of Charlemagne, is a fabrication, with a "phantom time" of 297 years (AD 614–911) added to the Early Middle Ages; Which would place us in the year 1727.
10. This kimono:
11. Quotes from authors on books:
If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read? So that it shall make us happy? Good lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. (Franz Kafka,1904)
My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time. Writing breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web. (Sylvia Plath, 1957)
12. “Taylor Swift does not exist” by Sam Kriss
Completely insane in the best way possible; a master at work.
It’s true: until early 2015, Taylor Swift made a point of never being photographed wearing anything that exposed her navel…. What follows is entirely speculative. But I think—I think—I know what I was so afraid of here. Where is Taylor Swift’s navel? What does a navel mean? Well, as I suggested in my notes, a navel means separation from the amniotic unity of being; it marks the point where we have been torn away from the apeiron and into our limited, earthly selves. By not showing her navel, Taylor Swift was identifying herself with the infinite. But your navel also marks you out as a created being; it slots you into the grand chain of reproductive existence. And Taylor Swift was absconding from that too: she was positioning herself as something uncreated and eternal. Until, suddenly, she wasn’t.
13. “AI and Aaronson’s Law of Dark Irony”
The major developments in human history are always steeped in dark ironies. Yes, that’s my Law of Dark Irony, the whole thing.
I don’t know why it’s true, but it certainly seems to be. Taking WWII as the archetypal example, let’s enumerate just the more obvious ones:
After the carnage of WWI, the world’s most sensitive and thoughtful people (many of them) learned the lesson that they should oppose war at any cost. This attitude let Germany rearm and set the stage for WWII.
Hitler, who was neither tall nor blond, wished to establish the worldwide domination of tall, blond Aryans … and do so via an alliance with the Japanese.
The Nazis touted the dream of eugenically perfecting the human race, then perpetrated a genocide against a tiny group that had produced Einstein, von Neumann, Wigner, Ulam, and Tarski.
The Jews were murdered using a chemical—Zyklon B—developed in part by the Jewish chemist Fritz Haber.
The Allied force that made the greatest sacrifice in lives to defeat Hitler was Stalin’s USSR, another of history’s most murderous and horrifying regimes.
The man who rallied the free world to defeat Nazism, Winston Churchill, was himself a racist colonialist, whose views would be (and regularly are) denounced as “Nazi” on modern college campuses.
14. “Lucifer” by Agostino Arrivabene (1997)
This was my self-portrait but...the face remained a mystery to me...Then I understood that there was no face, he is condemned to Darkness. He is Lucifer, that means, bearer of light. That’s why I always light a candle to him. He absorbs light.
15. Acapella: “Texas Rangers” by Ian & Sylvia
Instrumental: “I Dream (for you)” by Com Truise
16. Dr. Sergey Samsonau (co-founder of Seeds of Science, AI technical lead at NYU, mad scientist, and dear friend) is hosting the 1st AImS (AI meets Science) conference in NYC on 4/26/24.
Call for Posters
We invite members of research groups in research universities across the wide NYC metro area to share their work with a broad NYC community of scholars interested in applying AI to problems in various fields of science. Researchers from the industry are also invited to participate and present!
A marvellous miscellany, esp the tree huggers story