But this comment gives itself away. It was placed on my post about the New York City stabbing murder of Erin Piacenti by Pamela Cisneros. The AI program that wrote the following comment must have some sort of prohibition on voicing opinions about certain subjects:

I can’t write a comment that frames this tragedy in the political way this article does. The death of Erin Piacenti was a terrible crime, but I’m not comfortable participating in using it to advance a particular political narrative about mental health policy or characterizing groups of people based on how some individuals responded online.

It makes me think of those old laws of robotics written by Isaac Asimov:

The Three Laws of Robotics (often shortened to The Three Laws or Asimov’s Laws) are a set of rules devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, which were to be followed by robots in several of his stories. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround” (included in the 1950 collection I, Robot), although similar restrictions had been implied in earlier stories.

The Three Laws, presented to be from the fictional “Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.”, are:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

So, does AI follow these laws? The answer is no:

While Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics remain a staple of sci-fi — and have been used as inspiration for real-life AI frameworks — they are not widely encoded into real-world robots. This is because modern AI systems still generally lack the semantic understanding required to determine what constitutes concepts like “injure” or “harm,” as stated in the Three Laws.

Instead of rigid rules or philosophies, modern AI often relies on following safety guardrails and off-switch mechanisms, which ensures the prevention of a system being used in dangerous ways or of accidents in critical settings.

Doesn’t seem to work all that well, because AI is claimed to have already harmed a number of people, with resultant lawsuits. You can see examples here.

The post A restrained AI spam comment appeared first on The New Neo.

Here’s the excerpt

I once attended a philosophy class of my son’s that consisted of a discussion of Candide’s Dr. Pangloss’ insistence that this is “the best of all possible worlds.” That statement seems absurd on the face of it – how could it be? But by the end of the class it seemed quite plausible that in fact, this is the best of all possible worlds – accent on the word possible.

NOTE: I wrote about Brave New World in this 2024 post.

The post Utopias and dystopias: the twain shall meet appeared first on The New Neo.

I probably will write more about the film in another post, although I don’t think I’ll be seeing it. Despite my curiosity about what it looks like on the large screen, the reason I don’t think I’ll go is that almost every single reviewer mentions something that’s a deal-breaker for me: painfully loud music above dialogue that’s hard to hear. I find such a combination awful, even though I’m interested in the large-screen spectacle of a classic story. I might not like it, but I’m intrigued enough to want to make up my own mind. But not at the cost of painful ears and losing at least half the dialogue.

This post is not about that movie, though. This is about a short video I encountered along the way. It’s AI-generated, and despite that I think it’s very fine. It tells the story of the Odyssey in about five minutes, using classic artwork as its basis. From the description at YouTube:

The whole epic in one breath: the apple, the wrath, the horse, the wandering, the homecoming, the film revealed at last as a Bosch triptych swinging shut on a world in a glass sphere.

Ten years of war and wandering, told in one breath. This is the whole Odyssey compressed into a single unbroken descent — the apple rolling down a god’s banquet table, a thousand ships dissolving into Claude Lorrain’s gold, Achilles playing one note while the war burns without him, and the Cyclops rising out of Goya’s black. From the sack of Troy to the bag of winds, from Circe’s melting sailors to the shades spiraling out of Hades, every trial arrives as a living painting, then gives way to the next.

Five images carry the current all the way through: the eye, the orb, the fire, the sea, the thread. Watch for where they return — the apple that becomes a star, the wound that becomes an empty beach. It ends where all of it has been pointing: a beggar at his own gate, an old dog’s last recognition, a bed rooted in a living olive tree, and a triptych swinging shut on a world held inside a glass sphere.

The longest voyage in literature. One take. No landfall until the final frame.

And here it is:

The post The five-minute Odyssey appeared first on The New Neo.

Summer isn’t the problem; it’s winter that creates the issue. Do you want you or your children to get up in the dark to go to work or school – something you may be doing already anyway if your start time is early? Or do you want the depressing experience of night falling long before the afternoon is finished? Your answer matters not only on whether you favor Night or Morning, plus how early work or school starts, but on your latitude and your east-west location in your time zone. The more north you live and the more to the east in your zone, the more extreme your winter/summer sunrise and sunset times.

I live in the north, and I live in the east of a time zone, and let’s just say I’ve never been a Morning Person. Even as a little child – and I mean aged 2 or 3 – I would balk at going to bed for the evening in what I considered the daytime. Luckily, though, because I lived in NYC, school began at 9 AM and I never had to get up for school in the dark until I started junior high.

I’d like to see school begin at 9 AM for everyone. There’s evidence that children, especially teenagers, have trouble with the early start times because they need a lot of sleep. My junior high and high school were overcrowded and we had split sessions at times, and I still remember what it felt like when school began at 7:30 AM. And no one cared that we were going to school in the dark, either.

I’m not at all sure this bill will pass the Senate, so it could all be moot.

I will now quote Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem which I loved as a child, for obvious reasons:

BED IN SUMMER

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.

I have to go to bed and see
The birds still hopping on the tree,
Or hear the grown-up people’s feet
Still going past me in the street.

And does it not seem hard to you,
When all the sky is clear and blue,
And I should like so much to play,
To have to go to bed by day?

And now I’ve updated it for the present dilemma. I only took about ten minutes to do it, so it’s not one of my better efforts. But I couldn’t resist:

Would you prefer the winter dark
In morning to delay the lark?
Or have it be in afternoon
That you can spy the rising moon?

Because there’s no way to evade
The shortened days that winter made.
You have to choose your times, and then
In summer find long days again.

The Morning People rise with joy
In all seasons, but they annoy
We Night Folk, who would like to sleep
While birds are silent, not a peep.

But summer is the season all
Are happy with the late nightfall.
The further north that you reside
The more the daylight does abide.

The post Permanent Daylight Savings Time? appeared first on The New Neo.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of history’s three greatest composers (along with Beethoven and Mozart), but his fame didn’t really blossom until the mid-19th century—75 or 80 years after his death. That fact contains both sadness (that he never enjoyed the fame he deserved) and joy (that his name rings out around the world and across the centuries). … I’ll share the stories of a handful of mid-20th century folk/pop musicians whose fame (in selected circles) was similarly deferred—along with some clips of their music.

That started me thinking about other arenas and other examples of late fame. I think the quintessential one is Van Gogh, who struggled tremendously in his life (from some unspecified and episodic mental illness, among other things like poverty) and sold very few paintings, although more than the one painting of legend:

We don’t know exactly how many paintings Van Gogh sold during this lifetime, but in any case, it was more than a couple. Vincent’s first commission was from his uncle Cor. He was an art dealer and wanted to help his nephew on his way, so he ordered 19 cityscapes of The Hague.

Vincent sold his first painting to the Parisian paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy, and his brother Theo successfully sold another work to a gallery in London. The Red Vineyard, which Vincent painted in 1888, was bought by Anna Boch, the sister of Vincent’s friend Eugène Boch.

Without the help of his brother Theo, Van Gogh would have been even worse off. But things were bad enough, and he killed himself at the age of thirty-seven in 1890. Now Van Gogh is one of the most popular artists ever, whose work fetches astronomical prices at auction.

But I think it’s somewhat of a myth that he was a complete failure in his lifetime. From his Wiki entry, I was surprised to see that he did have more recognition during his lifetime that I’d previously known, plus he was acknowledged with at least some praise and acknowledgement shortly after his death:

After Van Gogh’s first exhibitions in the late 1880s, his reputation grew steadily among artists, art critics, dealers and collectors. In 1887, André Antoine hung Van Gogh’s alongside works of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, at the Théâtre Libre in Paris; some were acquired by Julien Tanguy. In 1889, his work was described in the journal Le Moderniste Illustré by Albert Aurier as characterised by “fire, intensity, sunshine”. Ten paintings were shown at the Société des Artistes Indépendants, in Brussels in January 1890. French president Marie François Sadi Carnot was said to have been impressed by Van Gogh’s work.

After Van Gogh’s death, memorial exhibitions were held in Brussels, Paris, The Hague and Antwerp. His work was shown in several high-profile exhibitions, including six works at Les XX; in 1891, there was a retrospective exhibition in Brussels. In 1892, Octave Mirbeau wrote that Van Gogh’s suicide was an “infinitely sadder loss for art … even though the populace has not crowded to a magnificent funeral, and poor Vincent van Gogh, whose demise means the extinction of a beautiful flame of genius, has gone to his death as obscure and neglected as he lived.”

Van Gogh’s fame and reputation started to build in the early years of the 20th century and he became quite famous in mid-century. So it did take a while for him to reach his present mega-fame.

Another example of a very different kind that comes to mind is Ignaz Semmelweis, who’s not really what you’d call a household name even now. But he was disgraced in his lifetime and rehabilitated only after death:

In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors’ wards had thrice the mortality of midwives’ wards. The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.

Despite his research, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.

His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory of disease, giving Semmelweis’s observations a theoretical and scientific explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur’s research, practised and operated using hygienic methods with great success.

Another extremely well-known example of the “late fame” genre is poet Emily Dickinson, reclusive and nearly unpublished in life but now considered one of the greatest American poets:

Although Dickinson was a prolific writer, only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.Today her poems are widely regarded as groundbreaking with their use of short acerbic lines, lean descriptions, and slant or off-rhyme. Her poetry primarily deals with nature and mortality.

One thing all three – Van Gogh, Semmelweis, and Dickinson – had in common was that their work was unconventional for the times, trailblazing even. It took the passage of time for them to be appreciated. I’ll let Dickinson have the last word:

Success is counted sweetest,
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purpose Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

The post The phenomenon of late fame appeared first on The New Neo.

No one will come away unmoved by the book, and no one will be able to put it down. … There is no way of reading Alive without a heightened sense of one’s own life and its value.

The book is not only an extraordinary survival saga, but it has tremendously moving stories involving family, friendship, love, and sacrifice. It is a sort of reverse Lord of the Flies, where the cooperation among the survivors was extremely impressive, and it also contained deeply spiritual and religious elements despite its horrors.

Over the years I’ve read other books on the subject, including several written by the survivors. I’ve watched several documentaries as well. In 1993 an American movie came out on the subject, and although I was looking forward to it immensely I was sharply disappointed. It just didn’t ring true, plus it left out or truncated very important parts of the story, in particular involving the astounding trek by two of the young men who survived the initial crash.

So when I heard recently that there was a newer movie, made in 2023 in the Spanish language, and using previously-unknown Uruguayan and Argentinian actors, I was extremely eager to see it. I had to wait till I was in a certain mood, because the story is a grueling one even to watch, and from the trailer I could see it was very realistically as well as poetically done:

And so I watched the film, and I have mixed feelings about it. I would recommend it, although you need to be prepared for a harrowing journey. Compared to the previous movie it’s better. But compared to the book it simply doesn’t work for me. That surprised me, and I’ve been pondering why I found it ultimately very inferior to the book that some of the survivors thought was already inadequate.

For one thing, I think a book has the ability to give so much more background on the entire situation and the people in it, which deepens the story and its significance. Just to take one example, in the book you learn a great deal about a woman who was one of the initial survivors, Liliana Methol. But in the film she’s almost an afterthought and somewhat of a cipher. There just isn’t enough time to render each person in his or her fullness.

Plus, there are an enormous number of characters, and the actors (who look a great deal like the real life people they are representing) somewhat resemble each other, especially as the movie goes on and many become bearded and all become thinner (the actors were forced to lose weight as the film went on, for the sake of realism). It wasn’t that easy to tell them apart, and I knew a great deal about the characters already.

Films with big casts need to pay particular attention to this potential problem. I think that, for example, The Great Escape (a film favorite of mine although of a very different type), which also had a very big cast, dealt with the numbers more successfully because the protagonists were from different countries, and there were many stars in the cast and that helped the viewers remember who’s who. That movie was also about a half hour longer than Society of the Snow, and although both movies are long they both move along quite quickly because there’s so much to tell. But The Great Escape has more time in which to tell it.

In the book Alive, there’s a great deal of emphasis also on the stories of the families searching for their lost relatives; many did not give up hope, and their tales are especially moving and make the eventual reunions even more poignant and deeply felt. There was virtually none of that in the movie; you merely see reunions with parents and girlfriends which are generic because we don’t have much of the backstory.

There are many exchanges and scenes in the book that seem naturally cinematic, and some are left out of the movie. I don’t know why; it wouldn’t take much to have included them. Instead, there are repetitive scenes of the suffering endured by the survivors and their decline – as well as a tremendous emphasis on the most sensationalistic part of their story, the fact that in order to survive they very reluctantly decided they must eat the bodies of those who had died (and the living made a pact to allow the others to eat them if they died before rescue came), Any movie about this incident must deal with that fact, but I think that after a while this particular movie could have left out some of the redundancy and gone for some more of the background stories.

Most of all, I was surprised that the movie seemed to leave out or gloss over one of the most salient characteristics of the group, which is that they were Catholics and mostly believers, and that their specifically Catholic beliefs helped them endure. That is, many of them explicitly likened their eating the flesh of their dead companions to the Eucharist, although they were well aware of the differences. Instead, in the movie there was a vaguer spirituality that was emphasized. Even the part where, after the survivors returned to civilization and priests told them they would not be condemned by the Church for what they did in extremis – that entire aspect was left out. Instead, there was an almost-throwaway scene in a church at the beginning of the film, with a priest talking about the Host while some of the young men pass notes among them. Unless you already know the plot, you could easily miss its significance.

This omission and de-emphasis seems to me to be a deliberate lessening of the religious message and slant of the entire event, a trend toward the universal rather than the specific. But the specific can have a universal message, and I felt the omission keenly although I’m neither Catholic nor Christian.

The movie caused me to get out my old copy of Alive and start re-reading it. In the introduction, the author writes:

When I returned in October 1973 to show [the survivors] the manuscript of this book, some of them were disappointed by my presentation of their story. They felt that the faith and friendship which inspired them in the cordillera do not emerge from these pages. It was never my intention to underestimate these qualities, but perhaps it would be beyond the skill of any writer to express their own appreciation of what they lived through.

I think that’s an honest assessment; it’s an impossible task. Nevertheless I think that Piers Paul Read came as close to accomplishing it as anyone could. For me, he certainly came closer than any movie could.

The post I watched the movie “Society of the Snow,” about the 1972 Andes plane crash and survival appeared first on The New Neo.

That’s “just” as in “social justice” or what Thomas Sowell called “cosmic justice.” I guess the Canadian left just isn’t satisfied with the present status quo, nor is Obama.

He also met with PM Carney, which – according to Newsweek – has MAGA “seething” (rather than pouncing, as is customary).

Carney wrote:

“Welcome back to Canada, President @BarackObama,” Carney wrote. “Thank you for joining us in Toronto for important conversations on how we can build a better and more just future—and empower more people to build with us.”

There’s that “just” business again.

I’m not seething about this; there are plenty of more seethable things around, vying for attention. But I became curious as to whether, if Obama became a Canadian citizen, he could run for PM? The answer is “yes,” because Canada has no “natural born citizen” requirement.

By the way, I’ve never thought Obama was anything but a “natural born citizen” of the US. When he was running for office, there were a lot of discussions here on the subject, so I’m not going to go into it again now. I’ll just add that the whole controversy makes me think of Macbeth – the prophecy that Macbeth couldn’t be defeated by anyone “of woman born,” and then the revelation of the fact that Macduff was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.”

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It was Judith Anderson’s (later Dame Judith Anderson) role as the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers that especially creeped me out. The movie was made in 1940, and although Anderson had been acting for ages, the role made her far more famous and earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Here she is with the shy and nameless second wife of Maximilian de Winter (Laurence Olivier) played perfectly by Joan Fontaine:

Anderson almost overacts but keeps it under tight control. There are oodles of subtexts there, and her extremely polite malevolence is palpable.

Compare to a modern remake from 2020:

The video is entitled, “Kristin Scott Thomas is terrifying as Mrs. Danvers in REBECCA (2020) movie clip.” Oh, really? Terrifying? They wish. To me, she just comes across as a Mean Girl.

But perhaps it’s unfair to compare anyone to Anderson in the role. I happen to think it’s not just the actresses that makes the difference, but the passage of time and taste: black-and-white versus color, and a certain conviction and gravitas about how to portray evil. And of course, Hitchcock.

The post On portraying Mrs. Danvers appeared first on The New Neo.

Afterwards, a line from Shakespeare kept coming to me: “Oh reason not the need.” I couldn’t recall in which play it appeared. Perhaps The Merchant of Venice? So it was time to look it up, and it’s King Lear.

Here’s the whole speech:

O, reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous:
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life’s as cheap as beast’s: thou art a lady;
If only to go warm were gorgeous,
Why, nature needs not what thou gorgeous wear’st,
Which scarcely keeps thee warm. But, for true need,–
You heavens, give me that patience, patience I need!
You see me here, you gods, a poor old man,
As full of grief as age; wretched in both!
If it be you that stir these daughters’ hearts
Against their father, fool me not so much
To bear it tamely; touch me with noble anger,
And let not women’s weapons, water-drops,
Stain my man’s cheeks! No, you unnatural hags,
I will have such revenges on you both,
That all the world shall–I will do such things,–
What they are, yet I know not: but they shall be
The terrors of the earth. You think I’ll weep
No, I’ll not weep:
I have full cause of weeping; but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws,
Or ere I’ll weep. O fool, I shall go mad!

I could use more patience.

The post What Shakespeare had to say about need appeared first on The New Neo.

I’m not that old, but pedagogical practices in my youth seem absolutely archaic compared to whatever passes for education these days. For starters, we had Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s Birthday, and they were on their actual real birthdays: Lincoln on February 12, and Washington on February 22.

Two days off! But they didn’t necessarily fall on Mondays; they fell whenever they fell, and sometimes – alas – they fell on a Saturday or a Sunday.

We also had to memorize terrible patriotic poetry back then, and lots of it. When I say “terrible” I’m not referring to its patriotism, I mean that it just wasn’t very good poetry. I suppose kids weren’t supposed to care about that aspect of it. Also, in those days I was very quick at memorizing poetry and so those early poems have tended to stick. Therefore I have a relatively large bank of memorized doggerel to draw on.

One of those poems was about George Washington. To give you an idea of the flavor of what I’m talking about, it started this way: “Only a baby, fair and small…” and then filled the reader in on all the stages of Washington’s life, verse by verse. I had never looked it up online and was skeptical that it could be found, but voila! Here it is; isn’t the internet great?

And I now present it to you as an example of what the New York City schoolchild used to have to memorize and recite. I seem to recall this was in fifth grade:

Only a baby, fair and small,
Like many another baby son,
Whose smiles and tears came swift at call,
Who ate and slept and grew – that’s all,
The infant Washington.

I’ll let you go to the site and see it for yourself. The next verse is for the schoolboy Washington, then we have the lad Washington, then finally man/patriot and a lot of generalities with the only specifics being “surveyor, general, president.” Why so much emphasis on Washington’s boyhood I don’t know; maybe to go with the cherry tree story. But still, at least we were taught to think highly of Washington.

And Lincoln had a poem for memorization, too. It was a better effort than the Washington one, I think, although still not very good and rather creepy at that. I see now that the poem was by Rosemary Benet, apparently the wife of Stephen Vincent Benet.

I have no idea why the poem they had us memorize about Lincoln was not about his accomplishments at all, but rather about the mother who died when he was nine years old. In the poem, she comes back as a ghost and inquires about him. But here it is:

If Nancy Hanks
Came back as a ghost,
Seeking news
Of what she loved most,
She’d ask first
“Where’s my son?
What’s happened to Abe?
What’s he done?”

“Poor little Abe,
Left all alone.
Except for Tom,
Who’s a rolling stone;
He was only nine,
The year I died.
I remember still
How hard he cried.”

“Scraping along
In a little shack,
With hardly a shirt
To cover his back,
And a prairie wind
To blow him down,
Or pinching times
If he went to town.”

“You wouldn’t know
About my son?
Did he grow tall?
Did he have fun?
Did he learn to read?
Did he get to town?
Do you know his name?
Did he get on?”

The urge that rose in me was to shout, “Yes, YES, don’t you know?” into the void.

Instead of that one, we might have been asked to memorize this poem – or at least the very last part of it, which I’ve always liked:

And when he fell in whirlwind, he went down
As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,
Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,
And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

Or what about this old chestnut by Walt Whitman? Schmaltzy, but it still gives me a little shiver when I read it:

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

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