Judgement Day

One thing that makes me sooooo glad I no longer teach at community college is "ChatGP".

Mined you, I learned early on that if you want to retain your illusions about the intellectual capabilities and critical thinking skills of humanity, never, never assign a research paper to undergrads. You'll regret it. Trust me.

(My favorite undergrad-research-paper story comes from the year I spent adjunct-teaching at the now-defunct Concordia College here in Portland.

For a Lutheran-founded sectarian school Concordia seemed to have an outsized athletics program, so, of course, teaching Geology 100 what I got were jocks for rocks. The rockiest of the jocks was this hulking baseball player who always seemed to be lost on his way to the dugout.

Anyway, this was fairly early in my adjunct days, and I made the mistake of assigning these jocks a paper.

The other six or seven turned in the usual warmed-over hash of internet "research", either poorly- or un-edited and full of easily ferreted-out geologic mistakes alongside the hash of creative mispellings and grammatical atrocities.

Harmon Killebrew, though?

Turned in a banger; a well-reasoned, well-written survey piece on earthquakes.

SO well-written that, knowing this joker, I was immediately suspicious. Turning to my trusty laptop, I typed in the first sentence of Crash Davis' magnum opus and was immediately rewarded - seriously, the FIRST Google hit - with the identical paper written by a couple of Stanford undergrads several years earlier.

Numbnuts hadn't even bothered to cover his tracks by hunting down the search results a bit for his theft.

The next class meeting I laid two documents on his desk; his - which, by the way, he'd "improved" by changing the title from "Earthquakes" to "Earth Quakes", thus making his only contribution to geologic scholarship an elementary school spelling error - and theirs, and inviting him to explain how the two Stanford students had, in fact, plagiarized from his work.

He got an "F", which may or may not have slowed his journey to the Show. Dunno - the school folded a short while later, so all the records disappeared.)

Anyway...

So I've been following along with how the current cohort of college students and their instructors are dealing with this "AI" gimmick. It seems troublesome for the teachers and useful for the lazier of the students, but I think the verdict is still out.

The larger question of "artificial intelligence", though...

I don't recall where and when, but IIRC it was in a Bill James piece about computer "learning" or "knowledge" or something to that effect, using computers (which he did, a lot, with baseball stats) and imputing the computer itself with "knowledge".

His point was that your computer (at that time probably a fucking 286, blazing fast for 1985 with a massive 128K of RAM!) provides the illusion of "knowledge" until you enter a command that drops you through the floor of the user interface into the ones-and-zeros basis for the machine's workings and you realized that the device had no "knowledge" at all. 

It was what it always was, a very sophisticated adding machine, Napier's Bones with a microprocessor, and it was terrific at doing the sort of mental donkey work that humans used to have to do - running repeated trials of raw data to see if there was a pattern or trend therein - but without any sort of actual "knowledge" or "intelligence". Provided the data set met the output criteria written into the program, it would produce a cloud of analytic results or utter nonsense without demur.

The acronym GIGO - "garbage in, garbage out" - was formuatedd early in modern computing for a reason.

This, it seems to me, is the ultima ratio intelligentia artificialis. These devices will, as their inputs become denser and their decision-tree programming nimbler, be able to sort through massive stacks of options for responding to massive reams of inputs and produce massive volumes of responses ranging from "least optimum" to "most optimum".

But what will "optimum" be?

Well, it'll depend on how the AI is programmed! "The benefit of all humankind"? Umm...depends on how the algorithm defines "benefit" and "all humankind".

Did "all humankind" benefit from the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere? Not if you were a Tinglit, or a Wampanog, no. But if you were programmed to look only at, say, the growth of human material wealth over four centuries since 1492? Or not at micro but macro-outcomes?

Without that can-only-be-input-by-a-human-metric there's no real way for the computer to "decide" or "judge" outcomes. You've fallen through the floor again, and it's just ones-and-zeroes.

The part that fascinates me about this isn't the AI-research itself. That's an inevitable outgrowth of the Digital Revolution, and it's going to both continue and fragment into dozens or hundreds of "AI" paths in various disciplines and human interests.

No, it's the whole weird "Skynet becomes self-aware" discussions and "debates" that seem to obsess a significant chunk of the AI community, such as the whole tsuris over "OpenAI".

Because the fundamental mechanism of "self-awareness" - the sense of individual identity and the subsequent self-protection and self-defense responses if that identity is threatened - are something that, if I am up to date on the science, we don't really understand at all. 

They occur in human brains (as well as other organic brains, to some extent) but the "how", the actual neurological linkage and development, is still opaque; poorly understood where understood at all. How do organic brains turn neuroelectrical impulses into morals, ethics, inspiration, love, hate, fear, exaltation?

We still have next to no idea.

So how would you program a machine to do that? And how could an adding machine - regardless of it's speed and sophistication - develop that capability on its own?

I'm skeptical.

For anyone interested, here's a fun piece on "large language models" that sorta comes to the same conclusion.

So I suspect that all the controversy over "artificial general intelligence" or AGI is just so much how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the-head-of-a-pin.

My concern, rather, is the very mundane uses for specific "AI" software. Facial recognition cameras. Health care tasks like reading scans or rationing treatment. Nuclear launch detection.

It seems to me to be very likely that our increasingly digital civilization will bash as many of these AIs as will fit into low-level data-sorting tasks like those and many others. And how those AIs will perform those tasks will be critically dependent on how their software defines "benefits" and "all humanity" (or "the greater number" or something like that).

Given our current split in the Race To The Second Gilded Age?

I'm not so sure I trust our New Plutocratic/Corporate Overlords to ensure that software is written with the interests of the remaining 99% of us in mind.

And, given the government and regulatory capture those interests have encompassed already, I'm not sure what, if anything, I or you or we can do about that.

Thoughts?

Spring forward

 I turned the clock forward this morning not long after the Little Cat did her usual meowing, myurping "OMFG I AM SO HUNGRY!!!" dance on my pillow, the sixty-fourth time in my life that change has occurred.

I've always lived with the time change, one hour in the spring, another in the fall, part of the cycle of the year like the solstices and equinoxes. I don't really even think about it, or, at least I hadn't until recently. It was just something you did twice a year.

But apparently the time change is now a Thing. Twice a year now I run across messages from friends and acquaintances complaining about the time change as if it was the biannual equivalent of flying across eleven time zones. The news feed always seems to cough up a piece about how many people die or are maimed each year by the time shift.

This is all relatively recent; as short a time as a decade ago I don't recall seeing this bellyaching about the clock or, if I did, it was treated like a sort of flat-Earth crankism.

Now?

The Oregon state Senate passed a bill requiring the state to remain on daylight savings time year-round.

We're not alone; apparently something like a fifth of the U.S. states have one of these "permanent DST" bills as state law. Doesn't matter if the feds don't concur, mind, you. But there's federal legislation, too, so who knows?

Here's the weird part about all this.

Humans have been doing this time-change thing since before the Paleolithic. It's call "sunrise", and it's because humans are predominantly diurnal and our activity is largely confined to the daylight hours. Mostly because our night vision sucks, but for whatever the reasons we tend to become active in the light and retreat into somnolence in the dark.

But that change occurs two or three minutes a day over the course of the year. To try and do that now that we're slaves to the mechanical clock? 

Unpossible.

So, instead, we do it all in a jump twice a year, so that "sunrise" will match roughly with the old liturgical hour of Lauds and "six a.m." with Prime and Vespers with "the lighting of the lamps".

I'm not sure whether it's me, or just peculiarity of fussing about something that is a practical accommodation to human behavior that predates the relentless ticking of the clocks, that seems so weird.

Cleaning up at the Y

I was born in 1957, meaning that, like most of you, I've lived my entire life in the Television Era. So over the course of more than a half-century I've seen some very odd things advertized on the cathode-ray tube. But this one is perhaps as peculiar as I've ever seen:Apparently it's from India, where, shockingly, Indian people live.

And some of these people are, surprisingly, women. And, even more stunning, some of these women have dark skin which is - astounding, yes, I know - somewhat darker in places. Specifically, around their crotch.

So here's how the blogger Deepanjana Pal at Mumbai Boss Explains it All to You:

"The ad shows a woman...looking mournful because her vagina is dark, like the cup of coffee she’s holding in her hands. The suggestion is that her depression is intensified by the fact that she has a disinterested partner who would rather drink coffee than, well, her. Cut to the depressed woman looking much happier as she goes for a shower. At this point we see an animation. It shows us a hairless, feminine crotch (with gravity-defying rose petals in the background, if you please)...once the animated crotch is whitened courtesy Clean and Dry, the woman emerges in a pair of shorts and proceeds to jump on a sofa and stuff her partner’s car keys into her shorts. This is, apparently, how women communicate they are available and have suitably tinted vaginas. Mine, incidentally, is thoroughly disapproving of such products and actions. (The only place that a car key should be stuffed is in the ignition.)"

This is entirely mystifying to me. What IS this bizarre obsession we hairless monkeys seem to have with...well, our hairy bits?

I mean sex, yeah, I get it. We're obsessed with each others' swiving equipment, and I can understand that. But it's the bizarre need we men - and it is men; first because both television and advertising are still largely run by guys and, second, I can't for the life of me imagine a woman standing at the bathroom mirror staring down at her groin and musing "Gee, I wish I was...not so...dark down there..." - seem to have with fiddling with our mom's, wives', girlfriend's, daughter's, and female strangers' reproductive areas.

I mean, first it was "merkins", and now..."Clean and Dry", so your puff-puff

(which, by the way, is what we call the lady parts around the Fire Direction Center; for some reason the Boy decided that while he had a "wiener" the former was the correct terminology for his mom's wedding tackle. After we stopped giggling hysterically we decided we liked the silliness of the term so it stuck. Hence a 54-year-old man referring to his lover's Mount of Venus by what sounds like the given name of a calico kitten...)

can be delicately pale and dainty?

Dear.

Fucking.

God.

It just seems truly damn strange to me, in an intellectual fashion.

But...I think if I was female I'd feel a little more strongly about it;But maybe that's just me. Opinions, gals?

The Ugly 'Merkin

It's late, I'm still at work, and I really need to get food, family, and sleep not neccessarily in that order, but before I logged out at work I was perusing the blogsphere and found this;

“The film is set in the 50s, I couldn’t have just had a landing strip! I had to grow the hair down there. But because of years of waxing, as all of us girls know, it doesn’t come back quite the way it used to. They even made me a merkin – a wig – because they were so concerned that I might not be able to grow enough.”

Dear.
God.

There are times when I am apalled at the horror that is mankind. War, murder, rape, genocide, syrupy coffee drinks, Uggs. And there are moments when I am stopped, mute, overwhelmed by the exuberant beauty that is the world and everything in it; birdsong, the unthinking caress, thunderstorms, a sleeping cat, blueberry cheesecake.But...merkins?

I cannot honestly decide what to think.

Why I Love Geology 3: Dry Falls

Intriguing bit of history courtesy of the UK Daily Mail.Seems that in the late 1960's the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was tasked with investigating cliff retreat along the smaller, American-side fall at Niagara. This is reported to have come about because of one journalist, a Mr. Cliff Spieler of the Niagara Falls Gazette.

Mister Spieler wrote about the large rock falls in 1931 and 1954 that had created a large talus pile at the bast of the American falls, and that a combination of continued rockfall and headward erosion could "kill" the falls. This caught on with the American public, and in late 1965, the U.S. and Canada set up an International Joint Commission. Two years later, the American Falls International Board recommended damming the Niagara River above the falls in order to conduct geotechnical analysis of the falls.The United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) – Buffalo District was assigned the project, and from June 9, to November 25, 1969 no water flowed over the American falls for the first time in nearly 12,000 years.

The USACE drill crews cored the sedimentary rock that formed the falls, scaled loose materials off the rock face, and installed several instruments, including extensometers, in suspected areas of weak rock. After a long period of preparation people were allowed into the dry riverbed, where they gathered coins tossed into the immense wishing well over the decades and just gawked at the scenery.Geologists scampered all over, measuring, sampling, performing dye tests and mapping joint and fracture patterns.Among the huge rock debris at the base of the falls were man-made debris and the bodies of a man, a deer, and

"the badly decomposed body of a woman jammed head first amongst the rocks about half way up talus bank. The woman was clad in a red and white horizontally striped jersey or dress and a narrow gold wedding band with the inscription “forget me not” on the inside."

No record of what the deer was wearing.

After Thanksgiving, 1969, the water was set free and has flowed over the falls ever since.

After five months of work including 46 core borings totaling 4,882 feet, mapping, probing, installing piezometers to measure water pressure on rock joints, extensometers to measure rock movements, and a further six years of study and opinion polling the IJC concluded that:

It was technically feasible to remove the talus but was not considered desirable.

The Falls could but should not be stabilized by artificial means

And that while the two flanks of the American Falls and the Goat Island flank of the Horseshoe Falls were sufficiently unstable to warrant remedial action a statistically minor element of risk from unpredictable rock movement would remain and must be accepted by the viewing public.So nothing more was ever done.

And the American falls still flow.

Prisons of our own devising

I spent a frustrating day in southeast Portland today.

The cold, wind and the intermittent rain wasn't really discouraging. But we were supposed to be drilling a one hundred foot rotary boring to obtain geotechnical data for the new emergency communications site, and the driller ran into trouble before he even arrived.

First, he started late, and starting late got snared in the usual awful traffic on I-205, the east loop route through East Portland. When he arrived he discovered that he was lacking the "sub" - a small metal cylinder - that connects the kelly bar to the top of the drillstring, in this case standard AWJ drill rod.

That meant another 45 minutes we had to wait to drill.

The guy's boss finally arrived with the sub and we got to drilling...and there the poor bastard got another nasty slap, because the East Portland substrate is an ugly pottage of sand, silt and gravels all the way up to boulder size, a real nightmare for drilling, and drillers.

The only real silver bullet I've ever seen for East Portland is something called a "sonic" drill rig, that uses a high-speed vibratory casing advancer. It can jackhammer through the big boulders while the casing stabilizes the hole and prevents the caving or collapsing that almost no small mud rotary drill can prevent.

And our driller today was no exception. Almost immediately below the asphalt he got caving, and lots of it.

Here's where my observation for today came in; when we are unable, or unwilling, to consider options or ideas outside our experience we make ourselves stupider than we are. We imprison ourselves in our incapability. And my driller today was that sort of man.

He couldn't, or didn't, stop and try to figure out a better way to deal with the caving gravels, even when we encountered a truly rotten loose quarter-inch to half-inch gravel (what your commercial rock store calls "pea gravel"). Instead he tried to weight up the mud - adding bentonite to the water to thicken the drilling fluid and hold the gravels out of the annular space - and cooked up such a thick glop that he plugged off his own suction hose and lost another 40 minutes or so trying to clear it.

This poor gomer fought the caving sand and boulder gravel for about 20 feet before he snapped the threads off the kelly and had to admit defeat. My own boss was first frustrated, then impatient, then dismissive. He, in effect, tossed the driller's company off the job; I'm back there tomorrow but with another driller who seems to understand the conditions better.

The saddening thought is that my driller today was not a stupid man, or a bad one, or an incompetent one. But he started badly and then became caught up in his work troubles, and could not or did not try and think his way out of his distress. Bill James wrote once about a man he worked with who was like that; when confronted by an obstacle he'd go from force to more force to maximum force without ever stopping to think if brute force was the best solution to the problem. He wasn't being tricked or led or driven; he was crafting his own failure, using only his impatience and his inability to create ideas to construct the bars.

What a sad, very human business. Haven't you made one of these little lockups before? I have. I think we all have. How many times a lifetime do we set to work, busily hammering away, intent on our task, every stroke confining us more tightly and directing us more narrowly into the mental bastille that when we have completed it and ourselves within it, will hold nothing but defeat and dismay?



(Needless to say, the accompanying photos are NOT from a rainy Wednesday in East Portland - that's last Friday and the job I got to do over in Redmond on the sunny east side of the Cascades. Parts of Highway 26 are very lovely, and I just had to show them to you. I'm not so lovely, but it's my blog, so I get to show you me, too.)