Episodes
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Mark Coatney, long-suffering digital media pioneer (Time! Newsweek! Tumblr! Al Jazeera!), gets me to finally read a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin and I loved it. Topics include our changing world, what the world is for, preindustrial longing, why we should maybe recognize that media companies are ephemeral things, the pitfalls of power, lame AI, floating orbs of light, humans imitating machines, why humans like things, leaky boats as a metaphor for a lot of software, and the fact that any human power can be changed by human beings – including, possibly, the power contained within ourselves.
Many thanks to Mark for coming out to record with me at Yale. Huge treat to get some time with him in real life.
Tons of shownotes!
The passage from Analogia by George Dyson that I refer to: "The Apache was a hard foe to subdue," according to John Gregory Bourke, "not because he was full of wiles and tricks and experienced in all that pertains to the art of war, but because he had so few artificial wants and depended almost absolutely on what his great mother – Nature – stood ready to supply. Our government had never been able to starve any of them until it had them placed on a reservation."Tales of the Tyrant, the story about Saddam Hussein mentioned by Mark.Parable of the Sower by Octavia ButlerSocial media and the Arab SpringFacebook's Oversight BoardBiz Stone's tweet revealing the weight of having to deal with Twitter accidentally becoming a non-state actorPlanetary BoundariesLe Guin's acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal, which includes this phenomenal passage: "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."Simon Willison on NotebookLM's AI podcast generatorMark's (is it really Mark's?) NotebookLM-generated podcast about Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence""Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art" by Ted ChiangLiterally UnbelievableDomi & JD Beck covering "Flim" by Aphex Twin"Girl/Boy Song" by Aphex TwinHow Russell Holzman teaches himself how to play breakbeats liveDay MillionTracking bird populations with radar dataThe Truth of Fact, the Truth of FeelingIf you enjoyed this, please share it.
Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.
Intro music by Secret School.
Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.
Please donate to Radiant Earth.
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Esther Dyson, whose bio defies summarization (and who happens to be sister of previous guest George Dyson), discusses Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Spike Jonze's Her. We discuss the substance of life, bioethics, why our senses aren't always reliable, institutions and culture, predatory business models, child labor, mortality, building communities, and gardening versus carpentry.
A few notes and links related to conversation:
Wellville, the nonprofit Esther founded to to achieve long-term, equitable, community wellbeingTwo-phase commit protocolGoogle AI search tells users to glue pizza and eat rocksThe Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison GopnikBetween Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia by Joshua YaffaExit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O. HirschmanThe Order of Time by Carlo RivelliSteve Jobs's 2005 commencement address at StanfordIf you enjoyed this, please share it.
Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.
Intro music by Secret School.
Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.
Please donate to Radiant Earth.
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Missing episodes?
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Jordan Tigani, duck herder and renowned "database person," gives us the gift of "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Luis Borges. We talk about about the potential of language, the limits of language, compression, sloppy ontologies, LLMs, what thing the universe is, simulated annealing, our vague comprehension of what embeddings are, and why it's unfortunate that there's no way to not sound pretentious when talking about Borges.
A few notes and links related to the conversation:
Read "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins". It's quick!The Wikipedia article about the essay is pretty good.Jordan is also a very talented writer about data and technology, which is great because he's better informed than almost anyone on the planet. Read Big Data is Dead from the MotherDuck blog.Simulated annealing on Wikipedia 🤯TrieHuffman codingLinnaean taxonomyWhy Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu MillerThe Importance of Common Data Schemas and Identifiers from the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum blog (written by Chris Holmes and me)Brad DeLong finds that ChatGPT doesn't know what ISBN numbers areEdgar Codd, proto database personWorldCat gets scraped (Hacker News discussion)I asked ChatGPT to write a limerick about Borges and I wish I didn't have to admit that it's pretty good:
🍀🇦🇷🍀
There once was a poet named Borges,
Whose stories were full of deep forges,
In labyrinths vast,
Where time could not last,
And mirrors reflected strange Georges.🍀🇦🇷🍀
If you enjoyed this, please share it.
Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.
Intro music by Secret School.
Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.
Please donate to Radiant Earth.
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Buy Night FlightBuy The Little PrinceListen to Minds Behind MapsLook at the glorious website for GDAL (the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library). It's perfect!"The Little Prince becomes world's most translated book, excluding religious works"The post on LinkedIn where I asked for people to recommend fiction books.
Next month's reading is "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Luis Borges. Read it! It's short!
If you enjoyed this, please share it.
Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.
Intro music by Secret School.
Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.
Please donate to Radiant Earth.
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A few notes and links:
Buy Jorge Luis Borges's Collected Fictions"The Zahir" PDF"An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" PDF (Note that this is a different translation than those in the Collected Fictions that I've recommended)The counterfeit Zahir (Reddit discussion)Idealism on WikipediaIf you enjoyed this, please share it.
Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.
Intro music by Secret School.
Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.
Please donate to Radiant Earth.
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George Dyson, historian, boat maker, master human technologist, and friend of friends discusses the totally wild The Voice of the Dolphins by Leo Szilard, which Dyson read when it was given to him by Szilard's wife when Dyson was 11 years old. We talk about AI, geopolitics, alignment (lol), and humanity.
A few notes and links:
George Dyson on Wikipedia
Leo Szilard on Wikipedia
The Voice of the Dolphins on archive.org.
George's book Analogia
Kontiki – the book that got George into lashing.
The Valencia Hotel in La Jolla, where George and Trude Szilard would hang out.
Walter Munk, legendary Austrian oceanographic data pioneer.
Carrying Google Street View cameras into the Grand Canyon in 2012. Who's in charge?
Bin Laden stans on TikTok
Extreme ultraviolet lithography – the thing I refer to when trying to explain nanometer scale transistor production.
Dana Gould on Pete Holmes's podcast talking about how a dog can't conceive of a computer, which may be a way to understand our capacity to conceive of other intelligences (i.e. gods)
Neils Barichelli and George's TED talk about Barichelli from 2003
Quote from Samuel Butler marveling at the installation of the first telegraph line connecting Christchurch to Lyttelton in New Zealand sometime in the 19th century, as recounted in Analogia: "We will say then that a considerable advance has been made in mechanical development, when all men, in all places, without any loss of time, are cognizant through their senses, of all that they desire to be cognizant of in all other places, at a low rate of charge, so that the back country squatter may hear his wool sold in London and deal with the buyer himself – may sit in his own chair in a back country hut and hear the performance of Israel in gypt at Exeter Hall – may taste an ice on the Rakaia, which he is paying for and receiving in the Italian opera house Covent garden. Multiply instance ad libitum – this is the grand annihilation of time and place which we are all striving for, and which in one small part we have been permitted to see actually realised."
All the books George suggested we read when I asked him to be on the podcast:
The Black Cloud (by astronomer Fred Hoyle)The Tale of the Big Computer (by magnetohydrodynamicist Hannes Alfveen, under pseudonym Olof Johannsen)The Voice of the Dolphins (by physicist Leo Szilard)On the Beach (by Nevil Shute, aeronautical engineer, but that’s science in my book)Childhood’s End (by Arthur Clarke, pioneer of satellite telecommunication)The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly-Baked Ideas (by I.J. Good, Turing’s cryptological assistant and pioneer of Bayesian network theory, who assembled this extraordinary collection by asking scientists to submit their wildest, craziest ideas--so it’s not strictly fiction, but close)If you enjoyed this, please share it.
Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.
Intro music by Secret School.
Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.
Please donate to Radiant Earth.
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Chris Beddow, mapmaker, voyager, philosopher, and very good skier uses Borges's "On Exactitude in Science" and Umberto Eco's "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1" to go very very deep on the map–territory relationship. Listen and learn how to recognize how your experience on this planet is mediated by the maps you use.
A few notes and links:
Read Chris's essays at WorldbuilderChris's essay on The Fractal Map and Impossible SymmetryBuy Jorge Luis Borges's Collected Fictions"On Exactitude in Science" PDFBuy Umberto Eco's How to Travel with a Salmon & Other Essays "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1" PDF"Raised by Wolves" by Simon RichPsychogeography on WikipediaIf you enjoyed this, please share it.
Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.
Intro music by Secret School.
Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.
Please donate to Radiant Earth.
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Sean Gorman, geospatial entrepreneur extraordinaire, uses Dune to explain security policy, geopolitics, capitalism, sustainability, common knowledge, the erosion of common knowledge, the importance of friction in political institutions, reasons to think harder about opening up data, and why the OpenStreetMap community are basically Fremen.
Note that we recorded this in August 2023, long before Dune: Part Two came out. There are no spoilers from the movie, but we discuss the book at length and Sean spoils a number of random YouTube videos about Dune that he watched to prepare for this discussion.
A few notes and links:
Please check out Zephr, Sean's latest startup which is making GPS more accurate and reliableSean on the AllThingsXR PodcastArticle by Sean on geopolitics and the future of global navigation satellite systemsSRI International (SRI)Buy Dune if you haven't alreadyIf you enjoyed this, please share it.
Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.
Intro music by Secret School.
Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.
Please donate to Radiant Earth.
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Jason Goldman, one of the world's foremost Dune podcast pioneers (listen to Escape Hatch!), talks about all of the Dune books, all of the Dune movies, the Dune TV shows, democracy, institutions, the dangers of charismatic leaders, the (a)moral arc of technological progress, the potential of governing with data, and how so many technologists miss the point of the literature they love. Our conversation left me wondering: could Obama be a mentat?
A few notes and links:
Escape Hatch - The podcast formerly known as Dune Pod, co-hosted by Jason with in depth discussions of all kind of great films. Check out their episode with Tim O'Reilly from 2020The International Relations of Middle-earthPresident Obama's Farewell AddressMichael D. Higgins, Ireland's President and poet who used to have two beautiful Bernese dogs named Síoda and Bród (may they rest in peace)"The Library of Babel" by Jorge Luis BorgesBuy Dune if you haven't alreadyIf you enjoyed this, please share it.
Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.
Intro music by Secret School.
Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.
Please donate to Radiant Earth.
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I've listened to this episode countless times as I've edited it and it is such a gift. I'm really grateful to Tim for doing it with me.
A few notes and links:
Frank Herbert, by Tim O'ReillyMany of the works Tim mentions in this post are mentioned in this blog post: Books That Have Shaped How I ThinkAt about 12:10, Tim mentions a passage about how Lao Tzu lists the attributes of a wise man, one of which is "roiled as a torrent." He explains this beautiful image in more detail in this blog post titled Knowing When to Let Go.The Man Watching by Rainer Maria RilkeJacob Wrestling with the Angel by Eugène Delacroix.If you enjoyed this, please share it.
Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.
Intro music by Secret School.
Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.
Please donate to Radiant Earth.
