The Police, "Driven to Tears"

Copeland.

Those were heady days.

Eleven.

When late morning rolls around, and you’re feeling a bit out of sorts, don’t worry; you’re probably just a little eleven o’clockish.

A. A. Milne, from The House at Pooh Corner

Musically.

van Gogh, Wheat Field with a Lark, Summer, 1887

In the end we shall have had enough of cynicism, skepticism and humbug, and we shall want to live more musically.

Vincent van Gogh, from his letter to Theo van Gogh, 24 September 1888

Highly.

I highly recommend Kurt's parasite-free arugula ...

Mackinac.

Boats racing in the Bayview to Mackinac have begun to make it to the island.

Watch from The Windemere or The Island House.

Telemann, Viola Concerto in G-Major, TWV 51:G9

Anna Krzyżak-Siarkowska performs with the Arte dei Suonatori Orchestra

Kindled.

It so many fires in my imagination were kindled inside this glorious building ...

IN the LIBRARY 

There’s a book called

A Dictionary of Angels.

No one had opened it in fifty years,

I know, because when I did,

The covers creaked, the pages

Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful

As species of flies.

The sky at dusk

Used to be thick with them.

You had to wave both arms

Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining

Through the tall windows.

The library is a quiet place.

Angels and gods huddled

In dark unopened books.

The great secret lies

On some shelf Miss Jones

Passes every day on her rounds.

She’s very tall, so she keeps

Her head tipped as if listening.

The books are whispering.

I hear nothing, but she does.

Charles Simic

Correct.

Steve's got us thinking.

Brockman has said it.  Musk has said it.  Hinton said, "They'll be able to outsmart us because they will have read all the books Machiavelli ever wrote, they will have access to all the data ever produced by humans."   

More human than human.  

We don't read.  Start reading.  More.

Read Ethan Mollick's book, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI ...

We have created a weird alien mind, one that isn’t sentient but can fake it remarkably well. It is trained on the vast archives of human knowledge, and also on the backs of low-paid workers. It can pass tests and act creatively, with the potential to change how we work and learn; but it also makes up information regularly. You can no longer trust that anything you see, or hear, or read was not created by AI. All of that already happened. Humans, walking and talking bags of water and trace chemicals that we are, have managed to convince well-organized sand to pretend to think like us.

Altman wants to monetize information gathering.

It is the user's job to provide the skepticism that ultimately restrains AI.  Active pursuit of the truth, Plato said: "All mere opinions are bad, and the best of them blind ... you would not deny that those who have any true notion without intelligence are only like blind men who feel their way along the road?"

Use the tools.  Read.  Listen.  Think.  Think some more, and then ... think again. Crosscheck with rigor.  Don't neglect your obligations. Do the essential work of choosing wisely.

In the long term a general AI system will need something akin to a sense of shame to prevent it from misbehaving.  It’s going to be the most important technology that humans ever create, so getting that right seems pretty important.

Greg Brockman

To avoid the mental slavery—or worse, extinction— a component of shame must be built into generation.  Just like a kid can “control” his capable, adult mother, not through superior intelligence or power, but by triggering a hardwired compulsion to protect and nurture it. Kids don't achieve goals with strength or strategy; it's vulnerability that activates the mother’s nurturing instincts. AI should be programmed the same way. 

That will never happen, so it's up to you, lab rat, to be skeptical.

Remember when Batty spares Deckard in Blade Runner?  Shame that drove that decision. Replicants were discounted and demeaned for their synthetic nature, while humans were shamed for being complicit in their use.  Batty's final monologue demonstrates replicant's liberation from shame. By sparing Deckard's life on the rooftop, doesn't Batty achieve a status "more human than human."

Correct AI.

Better yet, chuck it all in the bin and get a canoe.

Happy Birthday, Petrarch

You who hear the sound, in scattered rhymes,
of those sighs on which I fed my heart,
in my first vagrant youthfulness,
when I was partly other than I am,

I hope to find pity, and forgiveness,
for all the modes in which I talk and weep,
between vain hope and vain sadness,
in those who understand love through its trials.

Yet I see clearly now I have become
an old tale amongst all these people, so that
it often makes me ashamed of myself;

and shame is the fruit of my vanities,
and remorse, and the clearest knowledge
of how the world’s delight is a brief dream.

Petrarch, born on this date in 1304

Action.

Ari Weinweig on taking note and taking action ...

As I have been learning in the study of poetry and the development of a “poetic approach to leadership,” poetry cracks open emotional doors and allows us to crystallize our thoughts and focus our feelings in ways that might well do the same for others. Try reading any poem (better still, read one you wrote) out loud at the start of the next meeting you lead, and I’ll bet you dollars to Roadhouse doughnuts that you will, in the process, alter the dynamic of the whole gathering, almost certainly for the better. 

Inspiration.

CANARY YELLOW CANOE

In my canary yellow canoe - my yellow canoe

I want to go tripping in my canary yellow canoe

The Eastmain, Coppermine, Back River too

In my canary yellow canoe

In my canary yellow canoe - yellow canoe

I want to run rivers in my canary yellow canoe

The Desmoines River, Rupert River, George River too

In my canary yellow canoe

In my canary yellow canoe - mellow yellow canoe

I want to go tripping in my canary yellow canoe

Chebugema, Peace River, Resolute too

In my canary yellow canoe

In my canary yellow canoe - my elephant too

I want to go tripping in my canary yellow canoe

Churchill, Yellowknife, Ross River too

In my canary yellow canoe

Gordon Lightfoot

Inspiration ...

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

... to prioritize victory over, rather than coexistence with, the communist threat.

Rewarded.

Rockwell, Boy Reading of Adventure, 1920

The Atlantic says the end of reading is here ...

Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”

Later ...

If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair.

Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.

My students hear this from me every single day:  "Psst!  Hey all you readers!  Keep at it!  The habits of those around you are making it easier and easier for you to succeed!

Twain tried to warn us: The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot.

Real.

"Professor" McGonigle is the real deal ...

Capping an eight-pitch at-bat, the 2023 No. 37 overall draft pick doubled to right-center field, benefiting after Trout missed on a diving catch attempt. It was his 100th hit of the season, establishing a piece of franchise history.

McGonigle and Hall of Famer Ty Cobb are the only players aged 21 or under to hit the century mark before playing in 100 games. 

On July 12, McGonigle moved into third place all-time by reaching base 161 times before the All-Star break by players aged 21 or younger.

And he wears his pants properly. 

Right.

In my view all such definitions start from the wrong end of the subject, which is not about ‘things in the world’ but about a particular experience of them, and about the pursuit of meaning that springs from that experience. Does this imply that ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, that there is no objective property that we recognize and about whose nature and value we can agree? My answer is simply this: everything I have said about the experience of beauty implies that it is rationally founded. It challenges us to find meaning in its object, to make critical comparisons, and to examine our own lives and emotions in the light of what we find.  Art, nature and the human form all invite us to place this experience in the centre of our lives. If we do so, then it offers a place of refreshment of which we will never tire. But to imagine that we can do this, and still be free to see beauty as nothing more than a subjective preference or a source of transient pleasure, is to misunderstand the depth to which reason and value penetrate our lives. It is to fail to see that, for a free being, there is right feeling, right experience and right enjoyment just as much as right action. The judgement of beauty orders the emotions and desires of those who make it. It may express their pleasure and their taste: but it is pleasure in what they value and taste for their true ideals.

Sir Roger Scruton, from Beauty: A Very Short Introduction

Done.

Done and done.

A walk through Walker's Arms is always exciting.

Happy Birthday, Edgar Degas

Degas, Olive Trees Against a Mountainous Background, 1892

One sees what one wants to see. It is false, and that falsity is the foundation of art.  You must aim high, not in what you are going to do at some future date, but in what you are going to make yourself do today. Otherwise working is just a waste of time.

Edgar Degas, born on this day in 1834, from Renoir: His Life and Work, by Fosca Francois

Dwight Twilley, "I'm on Fire"

Order a carafe of Black Tower or Blue Nun ("... when you're not sure what you're having for dinner") and an extra side of ranch for your chicken nachos ...

Mackinac.

The 102nd Bayview to Mackinac Race begins today.

Watch live onboard Hot Ticket and Nobody's Fault ...

Track the boats HERE.

Watch the finish from the front yard of The Windemere.

Released.

Joy Division released Closer on this day in 1980.

Hooky's treatment of "Isolation" ...

Happy Birthday, Ian Stewart

Ian Stewart was born on this day in 1938.

With Lefty Dizz and some stragglers at The Chickerboard in '81, here's "Ugly Woman"...

Back.

Think of artificial intelligence as the "clear fire" as Professor Bloom reads from Chapter 119 of Moby-Dick, "The Candles" ...

Oh! thou clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship, till in the sacramental act so burned by thee, that to this hour I bear the scar; I now know thee, thou clear spirit, and I now know that thy right worship is defiance. To neither love nor reverence wilt thou be kind; and e'en for hate thou canst but kill; and all are killed. No fearless fool now fronts thee. I own thy speechless, placeless power; but to the last gasp of my earthquake life will dispute its unconditional, unintegral mastery in me. In the midst of the personified impersonal, a personality stands here. Though but a point at best; whencesoe'er I came; wheresoe'er I go; yet while I earthly live, the queenly personality lives in me, and feels her royal rights. But war is pain, and hate is woe. Come in thy lowest form of love, and I will kneel and kiss thee; but at thy highest, come as mere supernal power; and though thou launchest navies of full-freighted worlds, there's that in here that still remains indifferent. Oh, thou clear spirit, of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee.

AI will never be skeptical, it's programmed job is to satisfy you, validate you, make you feel "smart" (whatever that means) for ultimately doing nothing -- more symbolism over substance.  

YOU must be the skeptic and breathe the clear fire back intothe mouth of its fakery.

Released.

Echo &The Bunnymen released Crocodiles on this day in 1980.

"Stars Are Stars"...

Intricacies.

The Bodleian Map Room on the intricacies of ancient eclipse cartography ...

This map has ben copied four times very confused and scandalousy.

Since ye beginning of this new sett of maps now completely finish’d, several ignorant pretenders have started up & with great shew & noise frequently advertised their trifling performances: calling them cheap, curious, useful & correct: as to the first epithet, they are really dear at any price; in ye 2d. place , everybody may see they are wild, confused and poorly engraven; as for their usefulness, they tend only to lead people into errors; and so far from being correct, that the projection of their principal maps is notoriously false.

Traditional, "Pretty Saro"

Sam Shackleton has a go ...

Thanks, Mum.

Quality.

Big Jim Collie's shortcut through the Lairig Ghru, the highest mountain pass in the highest mountain range in Britain.

I've done this for years and I think it's the water of the hill water seems to add to the quality of the whiskey, as well. The way I drink it. 

... I have another little cargo in readiness.

Fortunately, Big Jim has another secret weapon, the Lairig Flyer. ...

Chaminade, Pièces humoristiques, Op. 87

Karin Lechner performs Autrefois ...

Strength.

The OAK

Live thy Life,

Young and old,

Like yon oak,

Bright in spring,

Living gold;

Summer-rich

Then; and then

Autumn-changed,

Soberer-hued

Gold again.

All his leaves

Fallen at length,

Look, he stands,

Trunk and bough

Naked strength.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Rest.

More.

Put out more flags.

Right.

Right compared to what? 

Excellent.

An excellent album ...

... to prioritize victory over, rather than coexistence with, the communist threat.

Retreat.

Didier Francois, nyckelharpa, Rolf Lislevand, theorbo, and Andre Lislevand, viola da gamba, provide this morning's Kapsberger retreat ...

Again.

Do not tread on the dirgey darkness of my Oyster Month gloamings.

Prepare ye.

Grieg, Holberg Suite, Op.40

The New England Conservatory Chamber Orchestra performs ...

Happy Birthday, Sir Joshua

Reynolds, Dr. Samuel Johnson, 1769

In the practice of art... it is necessary to keep a watchful and jealous eye over ourselves; idleness, assuming the specious disguise of industry... may be employed to evade and shuffle off real labor - the real labor of thinking.

Sir Joshua Reynolds, born on this day in 1723, from Discourses

Happy Birthday, Stewart Copeland

Stewart Copeland was born on this day in 1952.

"Reggatta de Blanc"...

Published.

Among other things, you'll find that you're not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You're by no means alone on that score, you'll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You'll learn from them -- if you want to. Just as someday, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It's a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. And it isn't education. It's history. It's poetry.

J.D. Salinger, from The Catcher in the Rye, published on this day in 1951

More.

Put out more flags.

Released.

Killing Joke released Fire Dances on this day in 1983.

"Let's All Go (To the Fire Dances)"...

Released.

D-wight Lightnin' released Under the Covers on this day in 1997.

"Claudette"...

I love it when a cover is better than the original.

Already.

All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff.

Frank Zappa, from an interview titled "Revolt Against Mediocrity" conducted by Batya Friedman and Steve Lyons in 1986

Boyce, Trio Sonata No. 1 in A-Minor

Beneath a Tree performs ...

Happy Birthday, Inigo Jones

Jones, The Walled Gardens at Milton Manor House, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, 1663

All these composed ornaments do not well in solid architecture and the façades of houses, but in gardens, loggias, stucco or ornaments of chimney pieces.  For as outwardly every wise man carrieth a gravity in public places, yet inwardly hath his imagination set free, so in architecture the outward ornaments ought to be solid, proportionable, according to the rules, masculine and unaffected.

Inigo Jones, born on this day in 1573, from Vaughan Hart's Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings

Simon Thurleyt's talk, Inigo Jones: The Architecture of Necessity

Happy Birthday, Andy Newmark

Andy Newmark was born on this day in 1950.

"My Only Love" with Roxy Music ...

Never.

Benjamin Warner’s Revolutionary-era linen knapsack and note to future generations remain two of Fort Ticonderoga’s most treasured artifacts ...

And whilst one shred of it shall remain, never surrender your liberties to a foreign invader or an aspiring demagogue.

Marvellous.

The Bodleian Map Room has the Oxfordshire Sheldon tapestry ...

Made from a mix of wool and silk the tapestries are both marvellous in their own right but are also important cartographic records, made at a time when England was beginning to be mapped properly for the first time. Each one would have originally measured approximately 15 by 20 feet and each has a "featured" county at its centre, bordered in red. Rivers and settlements feature prominently as do scenes of local interest such as the Rollright Stones, a prehistoric stone circle in north Oxfordshire, or a brief bit of text on the Worcestershire tapestry telling of a land slip. Important houses are shown though none as big as Sheldon’s, Weston House, which appears on all four tapestries, the very centre of the area the tapestries show. And what an area, when put together as a set of maps the range goes from as far north as the suburbs of Birmingham down past a beautiful, though comically inaccurate, White Horse at Uffington and from the Welsh border across to the Tower of London the whole of central England is depicted in glorious detail.

Beyond.

Ari Weinzweig on reading ...

Of course, as the news reports all too frequently of late, the drive to read is not the modern-day norm. Last summer, The New York Times cited a study from University College London and the University of Florida that found Americans’ rate of reading has declined roughly 3 percent a year for the last 20 years. 

The numbers are not encouraging, but there’s no time like the present to turn things around. In the larger context of the world, what’s at stake is not just reading for the benefit of the reader. Rather, it seems ever clearer to me that democratic constructs—whether in companies or countries—really depend on it. Regular reading builds the sort of empathy, curiosity, and culture of learning and creativity that we need to run the kind of caring, healthy organizations we’re out to create. As advocate Luis González Martin wrote last fall, 

Democracy depends on reading, but not in the abstract. It depends on the kind of reading that slows us down, unsettles us, and teaches us to think beyond ourselves. At a time when noise travels faster than nuance and democratic life feels increasingly fragile, the simple act of engaging deeply with a text becomes a form of resistance. Reading ambitious, critical, reflective reading remains one of the few spaces where citizens can rehearse complexity, recover attention, and cultivate the inner freedoms that public freedoms require.

What goes wrong, then? Well, to a great extent, Peter Senge says, the problem lies with the pervasiveness of hierarchical thinking in Western society:

The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.

In his famous 1949 novel, 1984, George Orwell writes, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” One way that autocrats take charge is, indeed, by managing information—including the suppression or even outright banning of certain books and materials that offer alternative pasts, presents, and futures out of sync with the autocrats’ preferred story. As I learned in my time studying Russian history, this sort of thing has been going on in Russia for the greater part of the last 500 years. Officially sanctioned reading materials supported the tsars, and then their successors: the Bolsheviks, Lenin, Stalin, and beyond. Opposition writings were banned, and their authors often went to prison or were pushed into exile. Today, it’s Vladimir Putin and his people who manage the information, cutting off the internet where they can, kicking unruly writers out of the country, et cetera, but the theme remains pretty much the same. 

One way to take back the past, present, and future is to read. In the process, we lean into and learn about alternative angles on the world. When we read, we are increasingly able to pursue new perspectives, think things through more effectively, enhance empathy, and compound compassion. In the presence of autocratic leaders at any level, Timothy Snyder reminds us, “reading good books is important.” Their import is being seen right now in Ukraine. As Snyder posted on Instagram last month, “A lesson from Ukraine: In moments where life meets death, they don’t put books down. Reading is resistance.”