Posts Tagged ‘weird’
“Purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous”*…
Doug Muir on one of Nature’s more striking creations…
There’s been a a certain amount of negativity floating around lately. So, let’s talk about a toxic, venomous freak of nature and the parasite that afflicts it.
Biology warning, this gets slightly squicky.Let’s start with the toxic, venomous freak of nature: the Portuguese man-o’-war…
… So it’s a jellyfish. Except it isn’t really: it’s several jellyfish, smooshed together. And here’s where the “freak of nature” part kicks in.
I mean, yeah, strictly speaking nature has no freaks; every species that exists, belongs; everything is a product of evolution and Life’s Rich Pageant, yadda yadda. But the Portuguese man-o’-war — Physalia physalis, for you biologists — is honestly kinda freaky. Because Physalia is a colonial organism.
What this means: a single Portuguese man-o’-war is composed of four or five separate animals. (We’re not actually sure how many.) One animal is the balloon-sail-thingy on top; another is the stinging tentacles; another is the digestive system; another is the gonads. And they’re completely distinct organisms.
How this happens: when a Physalia egg is fertilized, it starts dividing, like every other fertilized egg. But pretty quickly it breaks apart into two and then more distinct embryos — genetically identical, but physically separate. And those embryos develop into completely different creatures. Then, later in development, those creatures re-attach to form a single Frankenstein organism. The various parts have their own nervous systems, which don’t seem to connect.
Here’s an analogy: imagine that before birth, you are identical twins. But instead of growing into two babies, one twin grows into a bodiless head, the other into a headless body. Then just before birth they stick together, but they don’t actually merge back into one. No, going forward you are a bodiless head glued on top of a headless body, ever after. It’s kind of like that.
Now, colonial animals aren’t unknown in nature. But most of them are either dinky (Volvox, don’t ask) or they’re big, but it’s basically cut-and-pasting the same creatures over and over. So, some corals are colonial, but all this means is that the individual polyps have grown into each other to produce a sort of living carpet interlaced through their stony skeleton. But the man-o’-war is a respectably large animal — they can grow as big as a large house cat — and so are its colonial components. And the components are extremely specialized: the float-animal part of it looks and acts nothing like the tentacle-animal part.
Physalia is by far the largest complex colonial animal. And — this bit is odd — it doesn’t have any relatives. It’s the only genus in its family. Put another way, within the jellyfish it has no siblings and only a few very distant cousins. (One of which is the ridiculous creature known as the Flying Spaghetti Monster Jellyfish, but never mind that now.) It’s a very successful organism! There are millions and millions of them, found all over the world in tropical and subtropical oceans. So you would expect to see speciation, different relatives — big ones, little ones, a bunch of variations on a theme. More on this shortly.
But meanwhile, the whole “colonial animal” thing looks like evolution’s first attempt to figure out, you know, organs. I mean, the first multicellular animals were probably sponges, and sponges don’t actually have organs. But more complex animals have distinct and differentiated organs, modules of specialized tissue performing particular functions, because those turn out to be super useful. Physalia and other colonial animals look like a beta-test platform for this new “organ” technology. Most of the animal kingdom moved on to “oh wait, why don’t we just have one single creature that grows the different modules inside it”, but a few colonial animals stuck with Plan A and made it work.
Okay, so that’s the “freak of nature” part. What about the “toxic and venomous”?…
Read on to be astounded: “Occasional Paper: Four Hidden Species of Portuguese man-o’-war,” from the always-illuminating @crookedtimber, via Ingrid Burrington‘s exquisite newsletter, Perfect Sentences.
* “The purple, formalized, iridescent, gelatinous bladder of a Portuguese man-of-war was floating close beside the boat. It turned on its side and then righted itself. It floated cheerfully as a bubble with its long deadly purple filaments trailing a yard behind in the water.” – Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
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As we tangle with tentacles, we might spare a thought for Columbus Iselin; he died on this date in 1971. An oceanographer, he taught at both Harvard and MIT, and was a long-time Director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which grew materially in both scope and impact under his leadership.
His own work included both the invention of the bathythermograph and other deep-sea instruments responsible for saving ships during World War II and foundational scholarship on the oceanography of the Gulf Stream… where, of course, one can find the Portuguese man-of-war.
“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro”*…
But, Ammon Haggerty suggests, when it comes to AI, “going pro” is at least a waste and quite possibly a problem…
Kyle Turman, creative technologist and staff designer at Anthropic, shared a sentiment that resonated deeply. He said (paraphrasing), “AI is actually really weird, and I don’t think people appreciate that enough.” This sparked my question to the panel: Are we at risk of sanitizing AI’s inherent strangeness?
What followed was a fascinating discussion with a couple of friends, Mickey McManus and Noteh Krauss, who were also in attendance. They both recognized the deeper question I was asking — the slippery slope of “cleansing” foundation AI models of all that is undesirable. LLMs are a reflection of humanity, albeit at the moment primarily American and white-ish, with all our weird and idiosyncratic quirks that make us human. There is a real danger that we could see foundation models trained to maximize business values (of the American capitalist variety) and suppress radical and non-conforming ideas — a sort of revisionist optimization.
All this got me thinking about San Francisco, the city I grew up in, and where my dad, grandfather and great-grandfather called home. SF has been “weird” since the gold rush, attracting a melting pot of non-conformists, risk-takers, and radicals. Over generations, the weirdness of SF has ebbed and flowed, but it’s now deeply engrained in the culture. The bohemians, the beats, the hippies, LGBTQ+ rights movement, tech counterculture, and now AI. These are movements born out of counterculture and unconventional thinking, resulting in a disruption of established social and business norms. Eventually leading to mainstreaming, and the cycle repeats. Growing up in San Francisco, I’ve witnessed firsthand how this cycle of weirdness and innovation has shaped the city. It’s a living testament to the power of unconventional thinking.
Like San Francisco, AI also has a fairly long history of being weird. Early experiments in AI such as AARON (1972), which trained a basic model on artistic decision-making, created outsider art-like compositions. Racter (1984) was an early text-generating AI that would often produce dreamlike or surrealist output. “More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity. I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber. I need it for my dreams.” More recently, Google Deep Dream (2015), a convolutional neural network that looks for patterns found in its training data, producing hallucination-like images and videos.
These “edge states” in AI’s evolution are, to me, the most interesting, and human, expressions. It’s a similar edge state explored in human creativity. It’s called “liminal space” — the threshold between reality and imagination. What’s really interesting is the mental process of extracting meaning from the liminal space is highly analogous to how the transformer architecture used in LLMs work. In the human brain, we look for patterns, then synthesize new idea and information, find unexpected connections, contextualize the findings, then articulate the ideas into words we can express. In transformers, the attention mechanism looks for patterns, then neural networks “synthesize” the information, then through iteration and prioritization, form probabilistic insights, then positional encoding maps the information to the broader context, and last, articulates the output as a best guess based on what it knows previously. Sorry if that was dense — for nerd friends to either validate or challenge.
This is all to say that I feel there’s something really interesting in the liminal space for AI. Also known as “AI hallucinations” and it’s not good — very bad! I agree that when you ask an AI an important question, and it gives a made-up answer, it’s not a good thing. But it’s not making things up, it’s just synthesizing a highly probable answer from an ambiguous cloud of understanding (question, data, meaning, etc.). I say, let’s explore and celebrate this analog of human creativity. What if, instead of fearing AI’s ‘hallucinations,’ we embraced them as digital dreams?…
… While I’ve been vocal about AI’s ethical challenges for creators (1) (2), I’m deeply inspired by the creative potential of these new tools. I also fear some of the most interesting parts could begin to disappear…
A plea to “Keep AI Weird.”
How weird could things get? Matt Webb (@genmon) observes that “The Overton window of weirdness is opening.”
* Hunter S. Thompson
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As we engage the edges, we might recall that it was on this date in 1991 that Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released. It focuses on the struggle, fought both in future and in the present, between a “synthetic intelligence” known as Skynet, and a surviving resistance of humans led by John Connor. Picking up some years after the action in The Terminator (in which robots fail to prevent John Connor from being born), they try again in 1995, this time attempting to terminate him as a child by using a more advanced Terminator, the T-1000. As before, John sends back a protector for his younger self, a reprogrammed Terminator, who is a doppelgänger to the one from 1984.
The Terminator was a success; Terminator 2 was a smash– a success both with critics and at the box office, grossing $523.7 million worldwide. It won several Academy Awards, perhaps most notably for its then-cutting-edge computer animation.
“Strength lies in differences, not in similarities”*…
With the appearance of the first rays of the sun from Cerro Huantajaya in Alto Hospicio, northern Chile, people celebrate the arrival of the Aymara New Year, Machaq Mara, and the arrival of new energies.
For centuries, Inuit hunters navigated the Arctic by consulting wind, snow and sky. Now they use GPS. Speakers of the aboriginal language Gurindji, in northern Australia, used to command 28 variants of each cardinal direction. Children there now use the four basic terms, and they don’t use them very well. In the arid heights of the Andes, the Aymara developed an unusual way of understanding time, imagining the past as in front of them, and the future at their backs. But for the youngest generation of Aymara speakers – increasingly influenced by Spanish – the future lies ahead.
These are not just isolated changes. On all continents, even in the world’s remotest regions, indigenous people are swapping their distinctive ways of parsing the world for Western, globalised ones. As a result, human cognitive diversity is dwindling – and, sadly, those of us who study the mind had only just begun to appreciate it.
In 2010, a paper titled ‘The Weirdest People in the World?’ gave the field of cognitive science a seismic shock. Its authors, led by the psychologist Joe Henrich at the University of British Columbia, made two fundamental points. The first was that researchers in the behavioural sciences had almost exclusively focused on a small sliver of humanity: people from Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic societies. The second was that this sliver is not representative of the larger whole, but that people in London, Buenos Aires and Seattle were, in an acronym, WEIRD.
But there is a third fundamental point, and it was the psychologist Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania who made it. In his commentary on the 2010 article, Rozin noted that this same WEIRD slice of humanity was ‘a harbinger of the future of the world’. He had seen this trend in his own research. Where he found cross-cultural differences, they were more pronounced in older generations. The world’s young people, in other words, are converging. The signs are unmistakable: the age of global WEIRDing is upon us….
Are we breeding a global cultural and cognitive monoculture? More at: “What happens to cognitive diversity when everyone is more WEIRD?.”
* Stephen R. Covey
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As we delight in difference, we might send utilitarian birthday greetings to Jeremy Bentham; the author, jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer was born on this date in 1748. Bentham is considered a founder of modern Utilitarianism (via his own work, and that of his students, including James Mill and his son, John Stuart Mill); he actively advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalizing of homosexual acts. He argued for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty, and for the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children.
Bentham was involved in the founding of University College (then, the University of London), the first in England to admit all, regardless of race, creed, or political belief. On his death, he was dissected as part of a public anatomy lecture– as he specified in his will. Afterward– again, as Bentham’s will specified– the skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the “Auto-icon”, with the skeleton stuffed out with hay and dressed in Bentham’s clothes. Bentham had intended the Auto-icon to incorporate his actual head, preserved to resemble its appearance in life. But experimental efforts at mummification, though technically successful, left the head looking alarmingly macabre, with dried and darkened skin stretched tautly over the skull. So the Auto-icon was given a wax head, fitted with some of Bentham’s own hair.
It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of University College. The real head was displayed in the same case as the Auto-icon for many years, but became the target of repeated student pranks, so is now locked away.
see a virtual, 360-degree rotatable version here
“The child’s laughter is pure until he first laughs at a clown”*…
Catering to bikers, truckers, and other long haul travelers that find themselves off the beaten path, the Clown Motel is the final port of call before the yet another stretch of unbroken Nevada desert. It must be this location’s oasis-like location that has kept the establishment in business for so long, as the ever-watchful eyes of the ubiquitous clown figurines seem to serve more as a warning than a draw. From the moment travelers enter the adjoining offices they are greeted by a life-size clown figure sitting in a chair, cradling smaller figurines like familiars. In fact the entire office is covered in shelves and bookcases full of clown dolls, statues, and accouterment of every stripe. Stuffed animals, porcelain statues, wall hangings, and more make up the mirthful menagerie, staring down at guests from every angle.
Leaving the office with key in hand, visitors might also notice an arch just feet away heralding the “Tonopah Cemetery.” Just beyond the gate is a century-old miner’s graveyard made up of a gaggle of wood and stone markers. The very Platonic ideal of a haunted cemetery…
For those unafflicted by coulrophobia, “Clown Motel.”
* Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
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As we pop on our red noses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that the BBC premiered a new comedy sketch show– then improbably, now legendarily– entitled Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
“You don’t get explanations in real life. You just get moments that are absolutely, utterly, inexplicably odd”*…
A warning sign in Coober Pedy, a town in northern South Australia
There are over five million articles in the English Wikipedia… These articles are verifiable, valuable contributions to the encyclopedia, but are a bit odd, whimsical, or something you would not expect to find in Encyclopædia Britannica.
* Neil Gaiman
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As we wonder at the weird, we might send dissolute birthday greetings to the poster boy for oddity and excess, Caligula; he was born on this date in 12 CE. The third Roman Emperor (from from 37 to 41 CE), Caligula (“Little Boots”) is generally agreed to have been a temperate ruler through the first six months of his reign. His excesses after that– cruelty, extravagance, sexual perversity– are “known” to us via sources increasingly called into question. Still, historians agree that Caligula did work hard to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor at the expense of the countervailing Principate; and he oversaw the construction of notoriously luxurious dwellings for himself.
In 41 CE, members of the Roman Senate and of Caligula’s household attempted a coup to restore the Republic. They enlisted the Praetorian Guard, who killed Caligula– the first Roman Emperor to be assassinated (Julius Caesar was assassinated, but was Dictator, not Emperor). In the event, the Praetorians thwarted the Republican dream by appointing (and supporting) Caligula’s uncle Claudius the next Emperor.
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