In a recent post, I wrote the following:
[Without] the context of history, we're blind to the reality that we live in a world… deeply connected and familiar to the worlds of the past.
Perhaps it is just my brain seeing patterns where they don't exist, but this sentence really describes for me a truth about the world that helps me better understand our time and place. Take, for example, the questions of A.I. and the Longevity movement.
Something about hearing the phrase "Claude's Soul Document" got me thinking again about a problem I've long pondered. Software folks, like myself, have a long and proud history of taking words that exist and coopting them, manipulating the meaning of those words into feeble shadows of their former selfs. Tech people and tech companies do this on accident and on purpose, both because it can be useful to reduce a human concept to something simpler to quantify and because its easier to market and sell. Machine Learning, an academic term, becomes Artificial Intelligence and the word "Intelligence" is defined down in order to be achievable.
But before we get too far down the Current Events rabbit hole, let's take a step back.
Personally, I love it when Computer Science research accidentally stumbles on human truths, like this gem from an IEEE paper in 1995:
I'm no stranger to depressive episodes, though thankfully mine are sparse and usually brief: sometimes a day or two, though on rare occasions perhaps a week or more. I'm thankful mine have never progressed into anything serious. That said, I'd like to discuss something that's become somewhat of a theme in my conversations lately about depression, and something I hope you, the reader, might find useful when combatting this Great and Terrible Beast yourself.
To begin, I'd like to draw a distinction between depression and melancholy. There's a beauty to melancholy1 that there simply isn't with depression. One begets yearning, the other smothers everything in its path. I love melancholy, I really do, enough that sometimes I work to keep it going a little longer. Melancholy is a mourning wistfulness, the loss of something dearly loved, a cousin of grief and dour predilections.
Depression is a plastic bag, thrown over your head to choke off every breath of air until you succumb to its will. It's insidious, and it lies to you.
History as a subject is often viewed by students and the public at large as a domain without a use, a pedantic study of dates and names with some vague mission to remember the past—a memorial to ages past but neither a forward-looking or useful endeavor. The study of history produces teachers of history and nothing more. And while the study of history does not produce new widgets or novel computer advances, and nor does it deepen our understanding of materials science or physics.
The humanities, in which history and studies of language and culture are a part, are not there to improve our understanding of nature or develop technology, they exist to improve the minds (both cultural and individual) of the people we are.
History doesn't improve our world, it improves us. It gives us context for the world we live in and it helps us understand the reason why things are as they are and learn from the people before us.
Yesterday I stumbled on this quote from a blog post by JA Westenberg:
Michel de Montaigne arguably invented the essay in the 1570s, sitting in a tower in his French château, writing about whatever interested him: cannibals, thumbs, the education of children, how to talk to people who are dying. He called these writings essais, meaning "attempts" or "tries." The form was explicitly provisional. Montaigne was trying out ideas, seeing where they led, acknowledging uncertainty as a fundamental feature rather than a bug to be eliminated.
It's hard to convey the sense of both profound agreement and giddy joy I had reading that because, not only is the wider post about something I love (i.e. blogging), or because I learned something new about the history of writing (which is always fun), but because that quote describes something that I've been doing myself for the past two years and wanted an excuse to talk about!
It took me by surprise to learn that this post was now a decade old:
Last week I decided to leave Spotify. I've been using the service for almost 2 years now, and overall I've really liked it... It's hard to explain why [I'm leaving], but I guess I feel apprehensive about Spotify being in control of how and where I listen to music in ways I haven't been before.
I remember the inciting incident so viscerally. I wanted to AirPlay a song to my TV, but that device wasn't "approved by Spotify". It's an MP3 and I couldn't jam out to it because of the policies of some company. I was so angry, so I left. Without a viable alternative, I started buying albums in the iTunes Store like it was 2007 all over again.
Mathematics and Science are inextricably linked. As the renowned twentieth-century physicist Eugene Wigner wrote, mathematics is "unreasonably successful" in the natural sciences. By this he meant that it seems our entire world is seemingly beholden to the workings of mathematical laws.
Our most fundamental theories are complex systems of dense mathematical formulations that predict the behavior of the world around us so precisely that we’re able to peer into the earliest moments, right after the Big Bang itself and understand the workings of even the most extreme bending of space and time around black holes. Students of physics and the related sciences study these formulations and the mathematics they rely on for years, relentlessly working to gain mastery—and if they’re lucky—some intuition for the behaviors of complex, dynamical systems.
Yet, perhaps this relationship between math and science goes even deeper. Perhaps modern science and the scientific method itself do more than rely on mathematics. Perhaps—in no metaphorical sense—they are mathematics made manifest.
In 1619, Daniel Sennert crouched over a low furnace in his cloistered laboratory at the University of Wittenberg. The air was still and stifling. Though the room was packed, no one said a word. Instead, the several dozen learned men who had crammed themselves into the small space stared at a little white crucible as Sennert removed it from the flames. He tipped out the contents and a delicate stream of molten silver ran from the crucible to collect in an earthenware bowl.
Gasps filled the air. Such a thing wasn't supposed to be possible. Chills ran down the spine of every man in that room, even Sennert himself. For he knew, in that moment, the world had changed forever.1
In the days before Newton, Boyle, Kepler, and others remade the process of scientific inquiry, humanity's understanding of nature and our scientific methods were markedly different. The writings of Aristotle formed the foundations of natural knowledge and the workings of matter were explained by the qualities imparted by abstract Forms, rather than the formulation and arrangement of physical atoms.
This post has been a long time coming, but it's finally here now.
Pine.blog has been officially deprecated and deactivated. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns about this deprecation please send an email to support@skyrocket.software.
I believe that all active users were given appropriate notice and time to remove their data, but if you feel the need to contact me about your data (i.e. your feed subscriptions) please get in touch.
For those of you out there who still use RSS, and in particular NetNewsWire, I've put together a workflow in Automator that can take the currently selected article and generate an audio file of the spoken text.
I never will wrap my head around AppleScript's peculiar syntax, but regardless I've made the workflow file available for download below.
