Meanderings, 8 July 2023
Good morning! What an amazing world this internet can be in spreading information, news, commentary, pictures … everything. Now we’ve got Threads and, though I’ve signed up on the first day, along with Kris, for the life of me I can’t figure out what it’s doing that wasn’t already being done. So here are some bits and bobs you can find on the internet that I found on the internet because someone put them on the internet. Some of this is just plain fun. Have a good weekend.
Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash
Your weekend word: absquatulate
Definition: to depart suddenly; to abscond
In 1830 a newspaper in North Carolina, the Newbern Sentinel, ran an article about an unpublished dictionary, titled The Cracker Dictionary. The work appears to have remained unpublished (perhaps the title had something to do with this), but in reporting on the words contained in the book’s nascent form the article provides early written evidence of a number of 19th century Americanisms. Among these is absquatulate, which is spelled with an initial O, rather than A, and defined as “to mosey, or to abscond.”
In addition to absquatulate, the reader is informed of the meaning of a number of other similar terms, many of which have retained some degree of currency in our language; flustrated (“frustrated and prostrated, greatly agitated”), rip-roarious, (“ripping and tearing”), and fitified (“subject to fits”) have seen enough continued use that we define them in our Unabridged Dictionary. Other words contained in this never-realized dictionary, such as ramsquaddled (“rowed up salt river”) and spontinaceously (“of one’s own accord”) appear to have been lost with the passage of time.
Two of the loafers, we understand, were yesterday taken and committed to prison; the other has absquatulated.
— The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), 13 June 1837
Two authors filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last week alleging that their copyrighted books were used to train the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, without their consent.
Paul Tremblay, author of “The Cabin at the End of the World,” and Mona Awad, author of “Bunny” and “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” said ChatGPT generates “very accurate summaries” of their works, according to the complaint. They allege the summaries are “only possible” if ChatGPT was trained on their books, which would be a violation of copyright law.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment. Lawyers for Tremblay and Awad did not immediately respond.
ChatGPT automatically generates text based on written prompts in a way that’s much more advanced and creative than the chatbots of Silicon Valley’s past. The technology was developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, a research company led by Sam Altman and backed by Microsoft.
The chatbot is trained on an enormous amount of text data. OpenAI doesn’t reveal what precise data was used for training ChatGPT, but the company said it generally crawled the web, including the use of archived books and Wikipedia.
The lawsuit, which was filed with a San Francisco federal court, alleges that “much” of the material in OpenAI’s training data is based on copyrighted materials, including books by Tremblay and Awad. But proving exactly how and where ChatGPT gleaned this information, as well as whether the authors have suffered financial damages, could be a challenge.
The complaint references exhibits of the summaries that ChatGPT generated, and it notes that the chatbot gets some things wrong. Awad and Tremblay said that the rest of the summaries are accurate, however, which means “ChatGPT retains knowledge of particular works in the training dataset.”
“At no point did ChatGPT reproduce any of the copyright management information Plaintiffs included with their published works,” the complaint said.
You might needs some divine comedy instead of tragedy.
Just ask someone who studies manuscripts a question, like “what’s a codex?,” and you get a post like this:
P.Hib. 113, the papyrus kept at Graz that has recently been proposed as being the earliest surviving remains of a codex, continues to be in the news. I made a brief post about it some days ago, and in the comments to that post, David Kelsey raised an interesting question:
“If I were to take three sheaths of paper, fold them in the middle and insert inside each other to form a quire, then stitch the sections together, as a finished product I essentially have a booklet. But is this a codex? At what point does folded sheets gathered become a codex? Could this papyrus from Graz University be the front page of a booklet only and can it is so proved to have other associated pages written on both side be an actual codex?”
This is a good observation and really boils down to this: What do we mean by the term “codex”? Is it something more than a series of leaves linked together in some fashion? I tend to think of the codex as an example of a kind of technology, so it is indeed these physical characteristics that are most interesting to me. I would answer David’s question affirmatively. What he describes, a stack of three sheets folded together and stitched through the middle, is a small, single-quire codex.
But other questions remain. What about less flexible materials like wood or ivory–can these form codices? What about, say, a diptych joined by hinges rather than threads or tackets–is that a codex?…
Still other specialists also factor in the textual contents. In his reflections on “Les origines du codex,” Joseph van Haelst defined “codex” as follows: “The term ‘codex’ . . . designates a collection of sheets of papyrus or parchment folded in two, grouped into a quire (or quires), sewn together along the spine, and usually protected by a cover. Its content, unlike that of the so-called documentary codex, is a composition, i.e. a text designed for distribution and preservation. This may be literary (classical works) or professional-technical (biblical, legal, magical, medical, scholarly, etc.).”
I don’t really like this division between the (real) codex and “documentary codex,” but for better or worse, it is a part of the scholarly discussion. So, we really have three intertwined issues–physical form (leaves), method of joining (binding), and contents (documentary vs. literary).
Videos keep popping up on my social media apps, tutorials to disguise my hooded eyes. Yes, I’ve noticed them too, in the mornings and in pictures where I’m smiling but something looks different. The hooded eye, they call it. It came for me.
This is a problem the internet wants to help me with. And all the influencers on it. And the tips and products that they sell.
I can’t stop my face from being 47. My hooded eyes rat me out. I notice the names they delineate to our development: crow’s feet. Sun damage. Laugh lines are now called parentheses. As if my mouth is now enclosed, non-essential information. What’s essential to know is the aging that’s happening around it. Beauty tarnished. Invaded. Expiring.
Is it the Grim Reaper coming for my eyes—the hood of death? Death to the power of beauty, the power of femininity? Of the ability to be seen? Perhaps I will like the discretion the hood provides. The disruption even, to that raw, alluring power. The pivot that wrinkles offer, testifying to the power of story. It’s there on our faces.
All the signals that I ignored before are manifesting. The little lines forming around my lips reveal that I am an anxious person. They tell on me, saying “Look at this, you chew your lips all the time!” Wow, I never realized it. Always thinking myself as easy-going, and here I am eating my own flesh. I’ve been nervously consuming myself for years, and now there are grooves in the path my mouth contorts to make it so. …
Perhaps I will try the lid hack offered by these influencers. Perhaps when I do, I will believe that it will tell a different story. That something as simple as make-up can hide what the face demands.
On microplastics:
Let’s take a step back and review the evidence. Plastic gets into the oceans, but does it actually get into the fish? Yes, microplastics have been shown to be ingested by fish and other aquatic animals. But, are we then actually eating plastic-ingesting fish? “Yes, we are eating plastic-ingesting fish.” But don’t we just poop out the plastic?
Small enough microparticles may actually be able to get absorbed through our intestinal wall and enter into our bloodstream. This “uptake of ingested microparticles into small intestinal tissues and on to secondary organs has moved from being an anecdotal phenomenon to a recognized and quantifiable process”—but that was in rodents. Just because it’s been demonstrated across a variety of lab animals, doesn’t mean it happens in people. You don’t know until you put it to the test. The closest we have involves human placentas after childbirth. Researchers found that plastic microparticles could indeed cross the placental barrier from the maternal bloodstream. So, if the particles could get into a pregnant woman’s circulation, they might get into her baby’s circulation, too.
This is concerning because that plastic debris can be a source of toxic chemicals—both the chemical additives in the plastic itself and also the pollutants the plastic sucks up from the water that then can be released into the body. Bisphenol A (BPA) is one of the chemical additives that can originate from the plastic itself. Given that BPA concentrations have been measured in plastic debris, microplastics may be a major source of BPA in seafood. No one’s really looked into it—until now: a study investigating BPA levels in the edible parts of seafood.
Yes, fish and other seafood present one of the highest BPA contamination levels, but is that just because the study was looking at canned fish products, like tuna and sardines? Manufacturers may use BPA in the lining of food cans directly, but “BPA may leach from the plastic in oceans, causing a direct contamination of fish.” In fact, some argue that this BPA environmental contamination in fish could be worse than the BPA from the cans themselves. You don’t know until you put it to the test.
Europe’s first trains to use batteries as a main source of power have arrived. Hitachi Rail announced last week that 20 tribrid trains—nicknamed “Blues”—are now running on rail lines across Italy.
The trains have the ability to switch between battery power, electricity and diesel. They can travel roughly ten miles relying only on batteries, which recharge on their own as the train rolls down the tracks. The batteries can replenish themselves whenever the train is braking or by drawing electricity from an overhead apparatus that connects the train to a power line, reports CNN’s Julia Buckley.
Each train can accommodate up to 300 passengers and has three to four cars. While the trains—which are made from 93 percent recyclable materials—can technically reach speeds of up to 100 miles per hour, an onboard driver advisory system will recommend the optimal speed to help reduce energy use.
Compared to trains that rely exclusively on diesel, the new hybrids will reduce fuel consumption by 50 percent, according to Hitachi.
“The Blues train, with its pioneering battery hybrid technology, is a hugely important way for railways across Europe to reduce their carbon emissions while improving passengers’ journeys,” Andrew Barr, group CEO of Hitachi Rail, told Euronews’ Pascale Davies last year.
The batteries will help make the trains quieter, which will benefit residents who live along the routes. The trains are designed to make boarding easier for passengers with limited mobility, and they accommodate mountain bikes, snowboards and other leisure equipment.
Love your Saturday meandering