Posts Tagged ‘radio’
“Nothing scares corporate radio like public radio”*…
These are tough times for those who love (and/or depend on) local radio. The Trump administration has eliminated the federal funding on which many local public stations have depended, and consolidation has “homogenized” local commercial radio. And this, at a time when the civic and cultural news and engagement that local radio provides has never been more important.
Still, community-rooted local radio perserveres. Consider ldial, a curated collection from Adam Scott— a list that let’s you sample some of the best independent and community radio stations in the US (and, ideally, encourages you to find your own local options).
Then, remembering that the best local radio is your local radio, consider supporting your local station(s).
* Tom Petty
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As we tune in, we might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that Hormel registered the name and trademark “Spam” for its canned meat product. It is interesting to note that the company had marketed the product since 1937, and only felt the need to protect the name 13 years later.
“This incompleteness is all we have”*…
The impulse to “systemitize” morality is as old as philosophy. Many now hope that AI will discover and organize moral truths. But Elad Uzan suggests that Kurt Gödel’s work on incompleteness demonstrates that deciding what is right will always be our burden…
Imagine a world in which artificial intelligence is entrusted with the highest moral responsibilities: sentencing criminals, allocating medical resources, and even mediating conflicts between nations. This might seem like the pinnacle of human progress: an entity unburdened by emotion, prejudice or inconsistency, making ethical decisions with impeccable precision. Unlike human judges or policymakers, a machine would not be swayed by personal interests or lapses in reasoning. It does not lie. It does not accept bribes or pleas. It does not weep over hard decisions.
Yet beneath this vision of an idealised moral arbiter lies a fundamental question: can a machine understand morality as humans do, or is it confined to a simulacrum of ethical reasoning? AI might replicate human decisions without improving on them, carrying forward the same biases, blind spots and cultural distortions from human moral judgment. In trying to emulate us, it might only reproduce our limitations, not transcend them. But there is a deeper concern. Moral judgment draws on intuition, historical awareness and context – qualities that resist formalisation. Ethics may be so embedded in lived experience that any attempt to encode it into formal structures risks flattening its most essential features. If so, AI would not merely reflect human shortcomings; it would strip morality of the very depth that makes ethical reflection possible in the first place.
Still, many have tried to formalise ethics, by treating certain moral claims not as conclusions, but as starting points. A classic example comes from utilitarianism, which often takes as a foundational axiom the principle that one should act to maximise overall wellbeing. From this, more specific principles can be derived, for example, that it is right to benefit the greatest number, or that actions should be judged by their consequences for total happiness. As computational resources increase, AI becomes increasingly well-suited to the task of starting from fixed ethical assumptions and reasoning through their implications in complex situations.
But what, exactly, does it mean to formalise something like ethics? The question is easier to grasp by looking at fields in which formal systems have long played a central role. Physics, for instance, has relied on formalisation for centuries. There is no single physical theory that explains everything. Instead, we have many physical theories, each designed to describe specific aspects of the Universe: from the behaviour of quarks and electrons to the motion of galaxies. These theories often diverge. Aristotelian physics, for instance, explained falling objects in terms of natural motion toward Earth’s centre; Newtonian mechanics replaced this with a universal force of gravity. These explanations are not just different; they are incompatible. Yet both share a common structure: they begin with basic postulates – assumptions about motion, force or mass – and derive increasingly complex consequences. Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and James Clerk Maxwell’s equations are classic examples: compact, elegant formulations from which wide-ranging predictions about the physical world can be deduced.
Ethical theories have a similar structure. Like physical theories, they attempt to describe a domain – in this case, the moral landscape. They aim to answer questions about which actions are right or wrong, and why. These theories also diverge and, even when they recommend similar actions, such as giving to charity, they justify them in different ways. Ethical theories also often begin with a small set of foundational principles or claims, from which they reason about more complex moral problems. A consequentialist begins with the idea that actions should maximise wellbeing; a deontologist starts from the idea that actions must respect duties or rights. These basic commitments function similarly to their counterparts in physics: they define the structure of moral reasoning within each ethical theory.
Just as AI is used in physics to operate within existing theories – for example, to optimise experimental designs or predict the behaviour of complex systems – it can also be used in ethics to extend moral reasoning within a given framework. In physics, AI typically operates within established models rather than proposing new physical laws or conceptual frameworks. It may calculate how multiple forces interact and predict their combined effect on a physical system. Similarly, in ethics, AI does not generate new moral principles but applies existing ones to novel and often intricate situations. It may weigh competing values – fairness, harm minimisation, justice – and assess their combined implications for what action is morally best. The result is not a new moral system, but a deepened application of an existing one, shaped by the same kind of formal reasoning that underlies scientific modelling. But is there an inherent limit to what AI can know about morality? Could there be true ethical propositions that no machine, no matter how advanced, can ever prove?
These questions echo a fundamental discovery in mathematical logic, probably the most fundamental insight ever to be proven: Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems. They show that any logical system powerful enough to describe arithmetic is either inconsistent or incomplete. In this essay, I argue that this limitation, though mathematical in origin, has deep consequences for ethics, and for how we design AI systems to reason morally…
Eminently worth reading in full: “The incompleteness of ethics,” from @aeon.co.
And as if that were not enough, consider the cultural challenge implicit in this chart:
More background at “Cultural Bias in LLMs” (and here and here).
* Charles Bukowski
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As we own up to it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1942 that actress Hedy Lamarr and musician George Antheil received a patent (#2,292,387) for a frequency-hopping radio communication system which later became the basis for modern technologies like Bluetooth, wireless telephones, and Wi-Fi.
Hedy Lamarr made it big in acting before ever moving to the United States. Her role in the Czech film Ecstasy got international attention in 1933 for containing scandalous, intimate scenes that were unheard of in the movie industry up until then.
Backlash from her early acting career was the least of her worries, however, as tensions began to rise in Europe. Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, grew up in a Catholic household in Austria, but both of her parents had a Jewish heritage. In addition, she was married to Friedrich Mandl, a rich ammunition manufacturer with connections to both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Her time with Friedrich Mandl was bittersweet. While the romance quickly died and Mandl became very possessive of his young wife, Lamarr was often taken to meetings on scientific innovations in the military world. These meetings are said to have been the spark that led to her becoming an inventor. As tensions in both her household and in the world around her became overwhelming, she fled Europe and found her way to the United States through a job offer from Hollywood’s MGM Studios.
Lamarr became one of the most sought-after leading women in Hollywood and starred in popular movies like the 1939 film Algiers, but once the United States began helping the Allies and preparing to possibly enter the war, Lamarr almost left Hollywood forever. Her eyes were no longer fixed on the bright lights of the film set but on the flashes of bombs and gunfire. Lamarr wanted to join the Inventors’ Council in Washington, DC, where she thought she would be of better service to the war effort.
Lamarr’s path to inventing the cornerstone of Wi-Fi began when she heard about the Navy’s difficulties with radio-controlled torpedoes. She recruited George Antheil, a composer she met through MGM Studios, in order to create what was known as a Secret Communication System.
The idea behind the invention was to create a system that constantly changed frequencies, making it difficult for the Axis powers to decode the radio messages. The invention would help the Navy make their torpedo systems become more stealthy and make it less likely for the torpedoes to be rendered useless by enemies.
Lamarr was the brains behind the invention, with her background knowledge in ammunition, and Antheil was the artist that brought it to life, using the piano for inspiration. In 1942, under her then-married name, Hedy Kiesler Markey, she filed for a patent for the Secret Communication System, patent case file 2,292,387, and proposed it to the Navy.
The first part of Lamarr and Antheil’s Secret Communication System story did not see a happy Hollywood ending. The Navy refused to accept the new technology during World War II. Not only did the invention come from a civilian, but it was complex and ahead of its time.
As the invention sat unused, Lamarr continued on in Hollywood and found other ways to help with the war effort, such as working with the USO. It wasn’t until Lamarr’s Hollywood career came to an end that her invention started gaining notice.
Around the time Lamarr filmed her last scene with the 1958 film The Female Animal, her patented invention caught the attention of other innovators in technology. The Secret Communication System saw use in the 1950s during the development of CDMA network technology in the private sector, while the Navy officially adopted the technology in the 1960s around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The methods described in the patent assisted greatly in the development of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Despite the world finally embracing the methods of the patent as early as the mid-to-late 1950s, the Lamarr-Antheil duo were not recognized and awarded for their invention until the late 1990s and early 2000s. They both received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, and in 2014 they were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame…
“The sacred moon overhead / Has taken a new phase”*…
As Oliver Hawkins and Peggy Hollinger report, an analysis of commercial radio spectrum filings shows a growing number of players– government agencies, but increasingly private companies– bettting on the emergence of a lunar economy…
Private companies are staking claims to radio spectrum on the Moon with the aim of exploiting an emerging lunar economy, Financial Times research has found.
More than 50 applications have been filed with the International Telecommunication Union since 2010 to use spectrum, the invisible highway of electromagnetic waves that enable all wireless technology, on or from the Moon.
Last year the number of commercial filings to the global co-ordinating body for lunar spectrum outstripped those from space agencies and governments for the first time, according to FT research. The filings cover satellite systems as well as missions to land on the lunar surface.
“We will look back and see this as an important inflection point,” said Katherine Gizinski, chief executive of spectrum consultancy River Advisers, which has filed for lunar spectrum for three satellite systems on behalf of other companies since 2021.
Although total registrations were lower in 2024 than the previous year, the increased proportion of commercial filings reflects a race to build the infrastructure that will enable the “cislunar economy”, the area between the Earth and Moon…
More on the players and the game: “The race to claim the Moon’s airwaves” (gift article), from @financialtimes.com. See also:
* William Butler Yeats, “The Cat and the Moon”
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As we linger over the lunar, we might recall that it was on this date in 1971 that NASA accomplished the third lunar EVA: Commander Alan B. Shepard and Lunar Module pilot Edgar D. Mitchell became the fifth and sixth men to walk on the Moon (in the lunar highlands near the crater Fra Mauro) as part of the Apollo 14 mission.
During this four-hour “activity,” they deployed the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP)– scientific experiments that were left on the lunar surface and other scientific and sample collection apparatus. B efore lifting off on the next day, the astronauts went on another moonwalk almost to the rim of nearby Cone crater, collecting 42.9 kg of samples along the traverse. At the end of this 3.45 km walk, Shepard used a contingency sampler with a Wilson 6-iron connected to the end to hit two golf balls.
“Just remember: Abraham Lincoln didn’t die in vain, he died in Washington D.C.”*…
Ken Goffman (better known as R. U. Sirius, the co-founder and first editor of the seminal Mondo 2000) on an equally-seminal comedy group…
If you were a college student or Western counterculture person in the late 1960s-70s, the albums of Firesign Theatre occupied more space on your shelf and in your hippocampus than even The Beatles or Pink Floyd. If you were an incipient techno-geek or hacker, this was even more the case. Firesign was the premier comedy recording act of the very first media-saturated technofreak tribe.
In his tremendously informative and enjoyable history of Firesign Theatre titled Firesign: The Electromagnetic History of Everything as told in Nine Comedy Albums, author Jeremy Braddock starts by giving us the roots of a band of satirists that started out (to varying degrees) as social activists with a sense of humor. He shows them slowly coming together in Los Angeles while infiltrating, first, the alternative Pacifica radio stations like KPFK in Los Angeles, and eventually, briefly, hosting programs in the newly thriving hip commercial rock radio stations of the times, before they lost that audience share to corporatization.
Braddock takes us through the entire Firesign career and doesn’t stint on media theory and the sociopolitics of America in the 20th century that were a part of the Firesign oeuvre.
For those of us out in the wilds of the youth counterculture of the time, without access to their radio programs, it was Columbia Records albums that captured our ears and minds, starting with Waiting For the Electrician or Someone Like Him in early 1968. Their third album, Don’t Crush That Dwarf Hand Me the Pliers sold 300,000 right out of the gate and, in the words of an article written for the National Registry in 2005, “breaking into the charts, continually stamped, pressed and available by Columbia Records in the US and Canada, hammering its way through all of the multiple commercial formats over the years: LPs, EPs, 8-Track and Cassette tapes, and numerous reissues on CD, licensed to various companies here and abroad, continuing up to this day.” As covered toward the end of the book, they have been frequently sampled in recent years by hip-hop artists.
My introduction to Firesign came as the result of seeing the cover of their second album How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All in the record section of a department store in upstate New York. It was the cover, with pictures of Groucho Marx and John Lennon and the words “All Hail Marx and Lennon” that caught my eye.
It was the mind-breaking trip of Babe, as he enters a new car purchased from a then-stereotypical, obnoxiously friendly car salesman, and finds himself transitioning from one mediated space to another, eventually landing in a Turkish prison and witnessing the spread of plague, as an element of a TV quiz show.
The album ends with a chanteuse named Lurlene singing “We’re Bringing the War Back Home.” This was all during the militant opposition to the US war in Vietnam. Probably few listeners would have recognized “Bring The War Home” as the slogan of The Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), but Braddock gets it, like he gets the seriousness of Firesign’s satire. Indeed, Braddock notes that several reviewers, writing with appreciation about one of their albums, averred that its dystopia was “not funny.”
Most fans would agree with me that the peak of the Firesign run on Columbia Records was the exceedingly multivalent Don’t Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me The Pliers and the futuristic, AI-saturated I Think We’re All Bozos on this Bus, which I note in this interview predicted the future better than any of the self-described futurists of the 1970s. But to apprehend the richness of those two psychedelic assaults on the senses and on the idiocracy of its times, you will need to read the book and listen to the recordings or at least read this interview…
Read on for his conversation with Jeremy Braddock: “Firesign Theatre: The Greatest Satirists of 20th Century Media Culture and its Techno-romanticism were… Not Insane!” from @rusirius.bsky.social and @jbraddock.bsky.social
* Firesign Theatre, How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All
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As we cherish canny comedy, we might recall that it was on this date in 1932 that Walk a Little Faster opened on Broadway at the St. James Theatre. A “musical review with sketches,” it featured “April in Paris” (by E. Y “Yip” Harburg, who seven years later provided all of the songs– including “Over the Rainbow— for the film The Wizard of Oz) and writing by S. J. Perelman (who had just scripted the Marx Brothers films Monkey Business and Horse Feathers).
“For every complex problem, there’s a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong”*…
Last year, in explaining the Biden Administration’s emerging new economic policy, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan talked of a “small yard, high fence” approach to its trade with China. The idea: to place strict restrictions on a small number of technologies with significant military potential while maintaining normal economic exchange in other areas.
The estimable Henry Farrell argues that this approach to technology and China is working poorly (though, he suggests, it will work much worse if Trump wins and takes office in January). Self-reinforcing political feedback loops and self-reinforcing expectations are leading to breakdown.
The fundamental problem of managing geopolitics through manipulating technological trajectories is not readily solvable given existing means, Farrell suggests. We live in a much more complex world than existing state institutions are capable of handling. Therefore, he argues, we need to remake the state…
… Making the right choices in a complex policy environment requires an approach that is a world away from the application of brute force at scale. Your maps of the environment are going to be all wrong when you go in, and brute force is likely to have unexpected consequences. It isn’t just that you are going to make mistakes (you are), but your map of the actual problem you are trying to solve is likely to be utterly out of whack. As you try to catch up with China on EV, you discover that you don’t understand the market right. As you try to impose controls on military use of semiconductors, you find out that you don’t have the information you need to really actually understand how the semiconductor market works.
The problem – as Jen Pahlka’s book Recoding America explains at length – is that addressing such complex problems does not fit well with the way that the U.S. government works. When you are trying to impose order a vast sprawling bureaucracy, which is its own mid-sized global economy, and when your people don’t trust government much, you rely on rigid contracting systems, which define the problem in advance down to its finest details, even if that definition is out of whack with reality. You don’t build connections between the bureaucracy and outside actors, unless they run through cumbersome and rigidly pre-defined channels because it takes months or years to get approval for such connections. And you certainly don’t try to remake policy in realtime as your understanding of the situation changes. Pahlka’s book is cunningly disguised as an account of US software outsourcing practices. If it mentions either ‘national security’ or ‘economic security’ once, I don’t remember it. But it is arguably (along with Dan Davies’ similarly motivated The Unaccountability Machine) the most important book on these topics of the last twenty years. [Your correspondent heartily agrees.]…
… what do you do – is this. You start to think… about how to build economic security institutions that are designed from the ground up to manage complexity. If you want to take ‘small yard, high fence’ seriously as a policy approach, you need to build the apparatus to discover what lies inside, what lies outside, and what the barriers ought be. That apparatus – and its prescriptions – need to change over time both to match a better understanding of the policy environment, and changes in the environment itself.
And we don’t have the apparatus to actually implement small yard, high fence properly. Nor do we have it for pretty well every other plausible economic security policy you might imagine, short of a brute force decoupling of the U.S. and Chinese economies. And if you did that, you would need enormous capacity to manage the horrifically complex aftermath, if that aftermath could even be managed at all.
Clearly, it is far easier to make these arguments in the general than the particular. Saying that you need reforms is straightforward, but figuring out what they ought to be, let alone how to implement them in current political circumstances, is an altogether more difficult challenge. But it is where the debate needs to be going – and there is a role for technology in it. We are in a situation that rhymes in weird ways with the situation discovered by Vannevar Bush after World War II – recognizing that the needs of government had changed, that vastly better information and feedback systems were required to meet those needs, and that even if we didn’t exactly know what those systems were, we needed to start figuring them out, and quickly. That world had its pathologies. This one does too. But to prevent them becoming worse, we need better ways to manage them, and to ensure that the solutions are better than the problems that they are supposed to mitigate.
This is – obviously – a radical set of claims. But it’s one that is entailed by the diagnosis of the problem that I’ve presented. If we need to manage complex challenges – of which the U.S. China relationship is only one – we need a state that is capable of managing complexities. We don’t have one. And that remains a first order problem, regardless of however hawkish or dovish you are…
We need a new kind of state for the new geopolitics: “‘Small Yard, High Fence’: these four words conceal a mess,” from @himself.bsky.social (and @pahlkadot.bsky.social). Eminently worth reading in full.
* H.L. Mencken
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As we ruminate on restructuring, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 (7 years after the transistor was developed at Bell Labs) that Texas Instruments introduced the Regency TR-1, the first commercially-manufactured transistor radio. Its performance was mediocre, but its small size and portability drove sales of over 150,000 units.
Further to Farrell’s and Pahlka’s points, it’s instructive to ponder what became of the transistor radio as a product category (and of the competitors in it) over the next few decades– and the altogether-unanticipated plethora of small, convenient, hand-held product categories it spawned: calculators, mobile phones, tablets… and whatever comes next…
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