Status-Q

May 7th, 2024

AI Whitewashing

May 7th, 2024

Here’s a question, O Internet:

If I buy full-fat milk and dilute it 50/50 with water, do I effectively have semi-skimmed milk, or is there something more sophisticated about the skimming process?

And if I then dilute it again, do I get skimmed milk… for one quarter of the price?

Now, the quick answer, as I understand it, is ‘no’: milk contains a variety of nutrients, and several of these are water-soluble. So the process of ‘skimming’ to reduce the fat content doesn’t dilute these nutrients in the way that you would by just adding water: you still get them at approximately the same concentration when you buy semi-skimmed or skimmed milk.

But I learned a couple of interesting different things from asking!

The first thing is this wonderful diagram, found and posted in the comments by Spencer:

(click for full size)

It looks like something explaining the petrochemical industry, but much, much more yummy.

His comment: “I wonder how many of these I can have with my breakfast today?”

And the second thing is that, as well as beginning “Here’s a question, O Internet”, I could have asked “Here’s a question, O Artificial Intelligence”.

My friend Keshav did that, submitting my question verbatim to Perplexity, a system I hadn’t previously tried. Here’s the rather good result (and here as a screenshot in case that live link goes away).

I then went on to ask “Which nutrients in milk are water-soluble?”, and it told me, with good citations, with the comment that “maintaining adequate levels of these water-soluble vitamins in breast milk is important for the health and development of the breastfed infant”. So I asked a follow-up question: “Is this different in cows’ milk?”, and again, got a useful, detailed response with references for all the facts.

This stuff really is getting better… at least until the Internet is completely overrun by AI spam and the AIs have to start citing themselves. But for now, I think Perplexity is worth exploring further.

Thanks to Spencer, Keshav and other respondents!

May 6th, 2024

Whitewashing?

May 6th, 2024

Here’s a question, O Internet:

If I buy full-fat milk and dilute it 50/50 with water, do I effectively have semi-skimmed milk, or is there something more sophisticated about the skimming process?

And if I then dilute it again, do I get skimmed milk… for one quarter of the price?

April 30th, 2024

And the lion shall lie down with…?

April 30th, 2024

From our “this may help you win a bet in the pub” collection…

If you know the quiz show ‘QI’, you might imagine Stephen Fry asking “With whom will the lion lie down?”, and Alan Davies sheepishly responding “The lamb?”… before the claxons start, indicating a wrong answer.

Because if you look at Isaiah chapter 11, where the concept originates, you find rather different domestic arrangements:

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”

So unless they were all getting cozy around the same campfire, I’m afraid lions and lambs aren’t prophesied to lie down together any time soon. As is so often the case, someone came up with a snappier version later on, and that’s what stuck with us.

Now, is anyone else now thinking about that scene in Ghostbusters?

April 28th, 2024

A cautionary travel tale

April 28th, 2024

On Monday evening, I had a ticket booked to bring me back on the overnight ferry from the Hook of Holland to Harwich. (Here’s a bit of trivia for you: ‘Hook of Holland’ is actually a mistranslation of the Dutch name Hoek van Holland. ‘Hoek’, in Dutch, means ‘corner’, not ‘hook’. And if you know that Holland is only the north-west part of the Netherlands, then it is indeed the bottom-left corner of Holland, which is enlightening to those who, like me, have perused the map wondering what was quite so hook-y about it.)

Anyway, I duly arrived in the area, in my campervan, a few hours early and saw the ferry at the quay but, since you couldn’t check in before 9pm for the 11pm departure, I headed into the town and killed time buying provisions, taking Tilly for a walk, checking email, tidying things up etc. At about 9.30 we drove back to the ferry terminal, pleased with our efficiency and promptness… only to find the gate closed, the entrance area in darkness, and nobody to be seen.

Eh? what??

I started checking my emails, e-tickets and everything carefully, and discovered to my dismay that the ferry actually departed at 10pm, not 11pm, which meant that, having been pottering around for hours just a mile away, I had managed to arrive 15 minutes after the check-in had closed. How could I have been so stupid? Had I just been remembering the outbound journey, where the ferry did indeed depart Harwich at 11pm?

Eventually I realised that it was slightly more subtle than that. When I had made the booking, I had diligently entered all the relevant times into my calendar… but forgot to specify the timezone on the entries for the return journey. I used to do so much international travel that timezones were a regular part of my life, but since I’ve barely left the country since Covid, I’ve had many years to get out of the habit! The departure time had been correctly entered as 10pm… but in UK time. And so, during the two weeks I had spent in the Netherlands, it had always been helpfully displayed, on my phone, iPad and laptop, as 11pm. Only an hour’s offset, and exactly the same time as I had caught the outbound ferry, so I never thought to question it! Bother!

And so I found myself sitting on the dock of the bay, at 10-o’clock at night, with nowhere to go.

Fortunately, I had bought a Flexi ticket, and even though it didn’t technically entitle me to change my travel plans once the ferry was already sailing off into the distance, the people at Stena Line were very understanding, switching me to the ferry that left the following afternoon. And since I happened to be in a vehicle containing a bed, loo, water supply and heater, I was able to use the wonderful Park4Night to find a nearby spot where I could spend a peaceful night.

The following day actually turned out to be rather a good one! It was sunny, my car park was only a few hundred yards from a nice beach where Tilly ran free, and then with some diligent Googling we discovered a splendid bakery to get provisions for breakfast in a nearby town, and a country park in which to stroll. We hadn’t seen much sunshine for a few days, so it was a delightful way to end our trip… and a lovely contrast to the dark, abandoned ferry port of the night before!

All was therefore well that ended well. But I shall be checking that ‘timezone’ field in my calendar app more carefully in future!

April 26th, 2024

Live together in perfect harmony…

April 26th, 2024

I’m fond of both milk and dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is yummy kiddy comfort food. Dark chocolate is more sophisticated, more bitter, more ‘adult’. It’s also less likely to melt at inconvenient times, so helping you preserve that more sophisticated appearance.

But the problem, I find, is that dark chocolate often has too little taste. Even the better brands can be hard, waxy, slightly bitter slabs that don’t actually give much enjoyment, especially when you get to the higher-cocoa-content variants. More ‘fix’ than ‘fun’. Espresso vs latte. (But espresso, I think, has more flavour. Certainly more variety of flavour.)

And so I often think back nostalgically to the days of my youth, when Marks & Spencer sold what was, in my mind, the perfect Swiss chocolate bar.

It was a simple bar of dark chocolate, with a milk chocolate centre.

Bitter and yet sweet. Soft and yet crunchy. Non-melty, and yet easy to bite. Sophisticated and yet yummy. Yin and yet yang.

It seems so obvious: the ‘flat white’ of chocolate. And, as is generally the case with M&S food, it was very good. It could certainly have turned its nose up at anything made Mr Cadbury, and as for Mr Hershey… well, let’s not go there.

Now, we didn’t have anything as smart as an M&S Food store in the little town where I grew up, so this was a special treat which occasionally appeared after my mother returned from shopping in a larger metropolis. Perhaps its rarity, combined with rosy nostalgia, has elevated it to an unwarranted state of perfection in my mind… but there was no doubt it was pretty good!

And yet, at about the time when I graduated from having chocolate bought for me to buying it myself… they stopped selling it! I don’t know why. Perhaps it was marketing: are most customers actually purists who demand either black or white? Or perhaps there were manufacturing challenges of which I am unaware. Not only did Marks and Spencer stop selling it, I haven’t really seen its equivalent anywhere else in the intervening decades.

But if anybody out there knows of a good combination of high-quality dark and milk chocolate, I’d like to return to my childhood, so please let me know…

April 24th, 2024

A load of cobblers

April 24th, 2024

The Dutch, I gather, don’t have a specific word for ‘pothole’ because, well, they don’t need one. Having just returned from a two-week campervan tour there, I don’t think I saw a single one. I knew I was back in Blighty yesterday evening, though, when I had to swerve to avoid them before I even left Harwich ferry port. The UK now reminds me of a saying from my childhood (the first few years of which were spent in Africa):

“Which side of the road do they drive on in Kenya?”
“The best side.”

One thing that struck me immediately in the Netherlands, that I hadn’t noticed on previous visits, was that in cities, towns and villages, much of the ground is paved, bricked or cobbled, rather than tarmacked. This extends not just to driveways, footpaths and pedestrian areas, as we might do here, but to pavements, cycle lanes and many of the roads.

I include a few random holiday snaps (click for larger versions) which just happen to feature them, but, in truth, they are everywhere. (I guess ‘paved’ is usually a better description than ‘cobbled’ for what I saw in most places, but doesn’t make for such good blog post titles.)

I think they look much more attractive than our usual tarmac, water drains off promptly, and they are, of course, well-maintained, meaning they are generally pleasant to cycle on as well. (Though I can’t deny that their tarmacked cycle lanes, not being maintained by British workmen, are an even nicer ride.)

I wonder about the economics of this. Paving is presumably rather more expensive, initially, but may reduce the need for drainage irrigation. An installation probably wouldn’t last as long as tarmac, but when it does go wrong, it can be quickly and cheaply fixed. As I was looking for a parking spot in a residential area of The Hague, for example, one street was closed off as they were re-laying a large section of the nice herringbone bricks. When I returned after lunch, they were gone, and the street looked pristine.

My friend Pauline, who lives in Utrecht, commented wryly that the main effect was to prevent women from wearing high heels! I confess this wasn’t a problem I had considered. But then there are many aspects of paving I had never considered, like the fact that there might be a Worshipful Company of Paviors.

I wonder what their take would be on the current state of British vs. Dutch roads…

The opposite of pudding?

April 24th, 2024

This cafe in Zutphen, Netherlands, is of my way of thinking…

Stressed desserts.

April 17th, 2024

Remote Hero?

April 17th, 2024

I know some of my readers will have seen this on John’s blog, but for others…

A wonderful thing has happened. There is a new and marvellous recording of one of my all-time favourite tracks, Mark Knopfler’s Going Home, the theme music from the also-wonderful movie Local Hero.

As if that weren’t enough, it includes contributions by, well, basically everybody famous who ever picked up a guitar… from Sting to Joe Satriani, from Sheryl Crow to Eric Clapton, from Peter Frampton to Joan Armatrading… the list goes on… with Ringo Starr on the drums. I wish there were a video or some sort of annotation so you could see who was playing when.

And then it gets even better… this is a production in aid of cancer charities. You can listen to it, buy it, download it, and the proceeds go to a good cause.

Tilly and I are currently touring the Netherlands in our campervan, and this makes for fabulous road-trip music. I wonder how big a donation I’d need to make in order to be allowed to use it in my upcoming YouTube videos…

Our parking spot last night on the north Netherlands coast. This is very close to ‘Riddle of the Sands’ country: a rather different coastline from the beaches near Arisaig used for “Local Hero” (but we did visit those on a previous campervan trip).

April 12th, 2024

No Photoshop needed!

April 12th, 2024

I was, unfortunately, beheaded today, while visiting Teylers Museum in Haarlem. This was a trifle inconvenient, but I still managed to smile about it.

This is straight out of the iPhone camera, with no image manipulation. I look a slightly funny colour not because of embarrassment at my recent decapitation, because I got rather too much sun on Wednesday.

It’s quite an effective illusion, and if you look closely you may be able to work out how it’s done — answers in the comments, please…

What occurred to me, though, was that we in the sophisticated modern age would probably immediately look at this and think ‘Photoshop!’… and be quite wrong. Whereas those in the past who had never heard of Photoshop might get closer to the mark…

April 4th, 2024

Some suggested reading: AI and dopamine

April 4th, 2024

Andrew Curry’s thoughtful newletter ‘Just Two Things’ arrives in my inbox three times a week (which, I confess, is slightly too often for me always to give it the attention it deserves). The two things he talks about today included some gems, though.

First, he looks at Ted Gioia’s article, The State of the Culture, 2024 , which comes with the subtitle ‘Or a glimpse into post-entertainment society (it’s not pretty)’.

Gioia talks about the old dichotomy between Art and Entertainment:

Many creative people think these are the only options—both for them and their audience. Either they give the audience what it wants (the entertainer’s job) or else they put demands on the public (that’s where art begins).

but he then describes how a dopamine-driven world is changing that into something more complex and rather more worrying. This is only the beginning:

It’s a good and interesting piece, and well worth reading, but if you find it depressing you should also read Curry’s comments, which suggest things may not be as bad as they seem.

In the second of his Two Things, Curry talks about an article by Paul Taylor in the London Review of Books. (So, yes, you’re reading my comments on Andrew Curry’s comments on Paul Taylor’s comments on other people’s books. This is starting to resemble that fish picture above!)

The Taylor article is also very good, and I won’t repeat too much of it here. I will, however, quote a section that Curry also quotes:

We should be genuinely awestruck by what ChatGPT and its competitors are capable of without succumbing to the illusion that this performance means their capacities are similar to ours. Confronted with computers that can produce fluent essays, instead of being astonished at how powerful they are, it’s possible that we should be surprised that the generation of language that is meaningful to us turns out to be something that can be accomplished without real comprehension.

I like this, because it echoes Quentin’s First Theorem of Artificial Intelligence, which I proposed here about a year ago.

What really worries people about recent developments in AI is not that the machines may become smarter than us.

It’s that we may discover we’re not really much smarter than the machines.

Again, the LRB article is well worth your time, if you can get through it before being distracted by things which offer you more dopamine.

March 25th, 2024

Living history

March 25th, 2024

I was delighted to meet my great-nephew Jonathan — my brother’s daughter’s son — for the first time at the weekend.

I remember, in my childhood, meeting my Great-Aunt Grace. (She deserved that degree of capitalisation.) Though always kind, I remember her as a rather formidable woman from a different world. She lived in central London (which she knew like the back of her hand), was born in the 19th century, and had lived through the reign of several monarchs of whom, at the time, I was only very dimly aware. She died just before the advent of the personal computer.

And I guess that, in a few years, that’s how Jonathan may think of me.

“Great-uncle Q”, he will say, “was a relic of a bygone era. He used to write code himself, rather than getting a machine to do it! He even, can you believe, used a QWERTY keyboard! Have you ever seen one of those things? Wait – I have a photo of him somewhere, but it’s only two-dimensional…”

March 20th, 2024

What the internet was invented for

March 20th, 2024

About a decade ago, my friend Richard wrote a short blog post entitled “This is what the internet was invented for“. In it, he linked to “Ian’s Shoelace Site“, his point being that if you suddenly realise you’ve always laced your shoes in a particular way without really wondering whether it was the best way, then there’s probably someone out there with sufficient interest in shoelacing that they’ll have compiled everything you need to know about how to lace your shoes… and this turns out in fact to be the case. Ian Fieggen lives in Melbourne, Australia, and his site is wonderful.

Well, in a minor way, this changed my life, because I went and perused the Shoelace Site at the time, and so for the last ten years, most of my shoes have been laced using the Double Helix Lacing method.

Now, it’s pretty rare that I buy a new pair of shoes, and after my latest purchase, I forgot about this undeniable improvement, and left them laced in the way they came from the shop, can you believe? For several months! Well, while polishing them at the weekend, I realised the error of my ways, and immediately pulled the laces out and re-did them, and now my tensioning and untensioning is smoother, easier and more satisfying.

There are so many ways in which the internet is getting worse, and making life worse, all around us, that it’s nice to be reminded, from time to time, of all the ways in which it can also make things better.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser's blog

AI Whitewashing

Whitewashing?

And the lion shall lie down with…?

A cautionary travel tale

Live together in perfect harmony…

A load of cobblers

The opposite of pudding?

Remote Hero?

No Photoshop needed!

Some suggested reading: AI and dopamine

Living history

What the internet was invented for

Feeds

Recent Posts

Recent Comments

Categories

About Quentin

Links

Meta

About Quentin

Links