Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools. ― Thucydides

Whilst internal combustion engines reign, Teslas are getting quite some traction, But are they staying in their lane? We're told there will be a lot of pain,  What with all the climate action, Whilst internal combustion engines remain. Some doubt that there is much to gain, By conceding to the green faction, When they are straying from their lane. Others would have us catch a train. Could this be a perverse reaction? Internal combustion engines pull trains. Some rev heads reckon it's all in vain, just a temporary distraction, as long as they stay in their lane. As batteries boom, it would be fane, EVs are more than an abstraction, Whilst internal combustion engines remain, They will be staying in the other lane.

The WA Premier Roger Cook is quoted in the Australian today saying:  " Simply put, the laws went too far, were too prescriptive, too complicated and placed unnecessary burdens on everyday  Western Australian property owners ." Well done you Mr WA Premier. You did a rare thing in politics. You admitted your government got it wrong and corrected the mistake by repealing the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021 and re instituted the 1972 Act, with a few amendments.  That's one of the advantages of legislation over a constitutional change. You can correct your mistakes. If "we the people" of Australia make a similar mistake on the Voice referendum and find that the changes to our constitution also go too far and place unnecessary burdens on everyday Australians, then we will not have the luxury of repealing our mistake by passing a new law. We'll be stuck with the changed constitution unless we have another referendum.  There seems to be a lesson to be learnt

Samizdata.net  have pointed me to an article in Public entitled " Nacissism of the Fact Checkers ". It's a sobering though disturbingly unsurprising read.  It adds to the litany of distressingly wrong facts that have been endorsed and perpetuated by the "official narrative" and with the reciprocal suppression or censorship of correct "falsehoods".  Here's a list of such behaviours by fact checkers from the article: - calling out a self avowed parody site for misinformation on the Paris riots for posting a typically over the top clip from the action movie "Fast & Furious"; -  that claim by the New York Times, AP and the BBC that fake news travels 6 times faster than the factual news, turns out to be fake news itself. The claim is based on a single MIT study on small number of tweets , not news. - Facebook removing 20 million posts, and labeling 190 million posts about Covid-19 as "content moderation" because those posts did

Instapundit is right.  The predictive value of a narrative is the real test of its value. Just how many times has the predictive value of the official narrative failed us  recently? This is not to say the conspiracy theories are necessarily correct but you've got to give them some credence these days in the face of the abject failures of so many official narratives. Look at these recent official narratives  that come to mind as I write:  Wearing face masks is essential to public safety. We now know that they afforded us little if any protection. But they were mandatory because... the official narrative said we had to wear them. The COVID 19 virus did not come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They officially told us back then that the "f urin cleavage site " found on the Covid SARS 2 virus, which was principally responsible for it potency and infectiousness, came from an unidentified evolutionary source in nature (remember that brief moment when pangolins were the su

ALDaily has again wormholed me into another world. So I have belatedly recently discovered the calque  and a breathtaking array of other fresh linguistic neologisms and concepts from the clashes, enjambments and entanglements of English living with other languages.  The source is an engaging article in European Review of Books called Beamer, Dressman, Bodybag  by Alexander Wells .  If you love words please read it. I fancy you too will enjoy it and be as enchanted as I. Unexpectedly, Wells turns out to be an Australian, which may be one of the reasons I immediately felt comfortable with his tone, self deprecatory yet probing, but his piece sings a many layered and complex song that rises above its locality, Berlin, and its subject, English and Deutsche.  It seems that the global conquest of English as a linqua franca has now moved well beyond the realm of "globish", the pidgeon in which business people who are non native English speakers from different nations communicate

Gender, Race and Climate. These are the big ideas that matter in the 21st century. So get with the Zeitgeist folks.  You gotta go woke. As I understand the current, constantly changing, received progressive position on these big 3 topics, here's what we're supposed to think and believe: Gender : A person can be whatever gender they want to be. Anyone who thinks or says otherwise commits a crime against humanity. Race : Only blacks, the indigenous and people of colour can have and express legitimate views on blacks, people of colour and indigenous issues. Any white person doing so is a racist, wrongly appropriating the exclusive privilege of disadvantaged victims. Accordingly it is wrong for a non-BIPOC person to believe or, worse, say that all races are equal and that we should never discriminate against any person on the basis of race. This is because a non-BIPOC person cannot understand racial prejudice because they have not experienced negative racial discrimination and beca

The Turing Test: if you can speak to a computer and not know that you weren't speaking to a human, the computer can be said to be artificially intelligent...  ChatGPT passes this test.  Thank you techradar for pointing this out to me recently. And now Elon " AI stresses me out " Musk and a thousand others have signed a public letter calling for a " pause " in AI's headlong development due to " risks to society " . " Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable ," said the letter issued by the Future of Life Institute . Just how such a "pause" could be implemented and what king of regulatory framework could be created to realistically enforce it is not at all clear. The US congress? The European AI Act? The UN general assembly? A voluntary industry code? These all sound rather speculatively ineffectual against such a rampant  unleashed j

William Fear has published an insightful piece in The Critic this week entitled " Orwell, Camus and truth " (Hat tip again to ALDaily). The article tells the story of a missed moment in history when two of the 20th century's great writers might have met. And the anecdote is full of irony, verisimilitude and pathos as we onlookers speculate on what might have been had these two great friends ever actually met.  Orwell sat and waited, and waited, for Camus to arrive. He never turned up: he was laid up with an exacerbation of tuberculosis. They would never get the chance to meet again, and Orwell would die five years later, having lost his own battle with the same disease For friends they were according to Camus, though they never did meet or correspond, as far as William Fear can determine. What they shared was a deep seated need to pursue the unknowable truth and the wisdom to know that the essence of truth was that it was unknowable. Both of these writers took the view th

ALDaily , that inestimably worthy arts aggregator website, pointed me overnight to this fascinating article in Intelligencer, " You Are Not a Parrot " by Elizabeth Weil.  The article poured me down a rabbit hole into a whirlwind of speculation and intrigue about linguistics and computational learning. It enters and addresses areas of computer science well outside my comfort zone, as it explores with more rigor than I knew existed the growing conflict between Art and AI.   I have been sporadically pondering some of this stuff in the poetic shallows here from time to time .  It is slightly giddying to find out that this subject might have some real heft, depth and contemporary relevance. Even Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds is now expressing doubts about the benefits of technology Elizabeth Weil's article is largely about an impressive academic at the University of Washington, Emily M. Bender , and her actions in linguistics studies to attempt to challenge the hea

This quote is from another intriguing piece entitled " On the Need to Touch Grass " in the City Journal on 3 March by Lee Siegel.  He says: Robots do not possess and will never possess sensory memory. Welcome to the age of robots. And in this assertion, he provides me with  one more piece of ammo, notwithstanding the current GPSchat tsunami, with which to press my claim that AI can't actually cut it in poetry.  One of the essences of poetry is the cut through of association from the abstractions of mere word jumbles in the moment when the poem touches chords of sensory meaning in a reader or listener. Sure a code can auto-write a passable word salad poem by borrowing from existing creations in its data set, given a few parameters, but to hit a common or contrasting sensory nerve in a human audience mostly requires actual experience of that feeling. I don't completely dismiss the possibility that such a nerve can still be touched by accident or by random generation, bu