Things to Come

https://www.flickr.com/photos/home_of_chaos/7609870922
Image: Flickr

An intriguing photo caption from A Mind at Play, Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman’s 2017 biography of AI pioneer Claude Shannon:

Shannon set four goals for artificial intelligence to achieve by 2001: a chess-playing program that was crowned world champion, a poetry program that had a piece accepted by the New Yorker, a mathematical program that proved the elusive Riemann hypothesis, and, ‘most important,’ a stock-picking program that outperformed the prime rate by 50 percent. ‘These goals,’ he said only half-jokingly, ‘could mark the beginning of a phase-out of the stupid, entropy-increasing, and militant human race in favor of a more logical, energy conserving, and friendly species — the computer.’

Shannon wrote that in 1984. He died in 2001.

| Technology

Decisions

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acke-axel-johan-gustaf-jag-185-leander-s-body-washed-ashore.jpg

‘Suppose that a foolish man has seized hold of a plank from a sinking ship, shall a wise man wrest it away from him if he can?’

‘No,’ says Hecaton; ‘for that would be unjust.’

‘But how about the owner of the ship? Shall he take the plank away because it belongs to him?’

‘Not at all; no more than he would be willing when far out at sea to throw a passenger overboard on the ground that the ship was his. For until they reach the place for which the ship is chartered, she belongs to the passengers, not to the owner.’

‘Again; suppose there were two to be saved from the sinking ship — both of them wise men — and only one small plank, should both seize it to save themselves? Or should one give place to the other?’

‘Why of course, one should give place to the other, but that other must be the one whose life is more valuable either for his own sake or for that of his country.’

‘But what if these considerations are of equal weight in both?’

‘Then there will be no contest, but one will give place to the other, as if the point were decided by lot or at a game of odd and even.’

— Cicero, De Officiis, 44 BC

| Society

Fore!

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aroostook_Valley_Country_club_entrance_showing_US_and_Canadian_flags.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Golfers at the Aroostook Valley Country Club have to play carefully — a stray shot might leave the country. The club straddles the border between the United States and Canada — the course and clubhouse are in New Brunswick, and the parking lot and pro shop are in Maine.

The club was launched in 1929, when enterprising founders built the clubhouse just feet inside the Canadian border, so that visiting American golfers could evade Prohibition without having to pass through customs.

Both nations still play the course today, but border restrictions imposed during the pandemic mean that Americans now have to enter at an official border crossing.

| Entertainment · Oddities

Point to Point

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Caledonian_Road_tube_station_-_Labyrinth_228_-_geograph.org.uk_-_5938044.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Nearly every station in the London Underground contains an enamel plaque depicting a labyrinth. The collection were installed in 2013 by artist Mark Wallinger to mark the system’s 150th anniversary. Each of the 270 black and white designs is unique to its location, and all of them are posted in publicly accessible locations, so visitors can examine them directly, tracing the path with a finger. They’re numbered according to the route taken by the contestants in a 2009 Guinness World Records challenge to visit all stations in the system in the fastest time.

A list of all 270 labyrinths is here.

| Art

“The Farmer’s Life”

The farmer leads no E Z life,
The C D sows will rot,
And when at E V rests from strife
His bosom will A K lot.

In D D has to struggle hard
to E K living out,
If I C frosts do not retard
His crops, there’ll B A drought.

The hired L P has to pay
Are awful A Z too;
They C K rest when he’s away,
Nor N E work will do.

Both N Z cannot make to meet,
And then for A D takes
Some boarders, who so R T eat,
That E no money makes.

Of little U C finds this life,
Sick in old A G lies;
The debts he O Z leaves his wife,
And then in P C dies.

— Stenography, January 1887

| Language · Poems

In a Word

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cube_teapot.jpg
Image: Wikimedia Commons

heuretic
adj. of or relating to discovery or invention

Sea travel is not kind to teapots, which tend to drip when pouring, tip over on tables, and chip in storage. Entrepreneur Robert Crawford Johnson solved all these problems by designing a pot in the shape of a cube, with the spout tucked into a corner. His invention, patented in 1917, was quickly adopted by Cunard, and it was still in use on the Queen Elizabeth 2 as late as 1968.

| Technology

Long Distance

https://galton.org/essays/1890-1899/galton-1893-diff-1up.pdf

Francis Galton was interested in communicating with Mars as early as 1892, when he wrote a letter to the Times suggesting that we try flashing sun signals at the red planet. At a lecture the following year he described more specifically a method by which pictures might be encoded using 26 alphabetical characters, which could then be transmitted over a distance in 5-character “words,” in effect creating a low-resolution visual telegraph. As a study he reduced this profile of a Greek girl to 271 coded dots, which he found yielded “a very creditable production.”

This had huge implications, he felt. In 1896 he imagined a whole correspondence with a civilization of intelligent ants on Mars; in three and a half hours they catch our attention; teach us their base-8 mathematical notation; demonstrate their shared understanding of certain celestial bodies and mathematical constants; and finally propose a specified 24-gon in which points can be situated by code, like stitches in a piece of embroidery.

That opens a limitless avenue for colloquy — the Martians send images of Saturn, Earth, the solar system, and domestic and sociological drawings, a new one every evening. Galton concludes that two astronomical bodies that are close enough to signal one another with flashes of light already have everything they need to establish “an efficient inter-stellar language.”

| Language · Science & Math

Star Turn

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lionel_Royce_in_White_Pongo.jpg

Stage actor Leo Reuss was just gaining fame in Berlin when the rising Nazi regime began to restrict the work of Jewish actors. So Reuss invented a new character. Retreating to a cabin in his native Austria, he grew out his beard, bathed in hydrogen peroxide to bleach his hair, studied the speech and mannerisms of farmers, and obtained new papers from a local peasant.

After a year’s effort he had recreated himself as Kaspar Brandhofer, a self-educated Tyrolian actor. When he returned to the stage, his former director Max Reinhardt failed to recognize him and in fact recommended him to Ernst Lothar in Vienna, where in 1936 Reuss played a featured role in the stage adaptation of Fräulein Else. The actors he worked among never suspected the ruse, despite their earlier work together.

Critics hailed the performance, calling Reuss “the humble peasant of the Austrian Alps, the finest natural actor of his generation,” and Lothar offered him a three-year contract. But his eventual confession brought on an uproar, and he decided that the Nazi regime had grown too strong. He emigrated to the United States, where he went on to an active movie career as Lionel Royce, appearing in almost 40 films before his death in 1946.

| Entertainment