My Private 1619

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Utopia

The grand utopia of hope never ceases to soothe me when I listen to Martin Luther King:

Puritanism

A definition:

“Puritanism is the haunting fear that somewhere, someone, may be happy.”

H.L. Mencken

Returning to A Study of VS Naipaul

In 1997 I had composed a monograph on V.S. Naipaul toward a fulfillment of my PhD at the University of Denver.

However, for reasons pecuniary, I transferred to New York University and had to embark on another journey.

You could say, I had let go of Naipaul as he had got a bit passe in the academic circuit.

At present, I am returning to re reading Naipaul and finding designs, small and big, but intricate, nonetheless, in an effort to re acquaint.

Some fragments of my path to a re acquaintanceship with Naipaul are below.

The controversial writer on the cover of Newsweek:

V.S. Naipaul’s 2001 Nobel Prize acceptance speech (some say, he lived just to win it).

The BBC’s not-so-glorious biography of V.S. Naipaul.

Best Book End(ing)s

This is how V.S. Naipaul’s novel, “A Bend in the River” closes.

“The sky hazed over and the sinking sun showed orange and was reflected in a golden line in the muddy water. Then we sailed into a golden glow…Water hyacinths pushed up in the narrow space between the steamer and the barge. We went on darkness fell. It was in this darkness that abruptly, with many loud noises, we stopped…the searchlight lit up the barge passengers, who behind bars and wired guards, as yet scarcely seemed to understand that they were adrift. Then there were gunshots. The searchlights were turned off; the barge was no longer to be seen. The steamer started out again and without lights down the river, away from the area of battle. The air would have been full of moths and flying insects. The searchlight, while it was on, had shown thousands, white in the white light.”

The scene is of escape from the menace of a military coup in a city on the coast of Africa.

Metamorphosis

The metamorphosis of data into artificial intelligence is not quite like that of human into insect.

While the latter in Kafka’s novel, “Metamorphosis” is a giant metaphor for the sensitive human’s alienation from a bureaucratized society, the former is encased in a metaphor by Geoffry Hinton, a Computer Scientist, known as the “Godfather of A.I.”.

To break down the fact of a peril posed by artificial intelligence to human society, Hinton uses the metaphor of the dragonfly’s emergence from the larva thus:

[…] The larva is a very different looking insect than the dragonfly, with its own eyes and legs; it had a hole in its back through which the dragonfly had crawled. […] The larva of the dragonfly is this monster that lives under water. And like in the movie “Alien”, the dragonfly is breaking out of the back of the monster. The larva went into a phase where it turned into soup, and then dragonfly was built out of the soup.”

In Hinton’s extended metaphor of process, the larva represented the data that had gone into the making of modern neural nets; the dragonfly stood for the agile A.I. that had been created from it. The deep learning–a technology pioneered by Hinton–had caused the metamorphosis. The beauty of the dragonfly is notable. The metaphor is about how in the case of A.I. we start with one thing which becomes quite something else.

The cover of the first “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists”, 1947 (published by the University of Chicago).

The “doomsday clock” was designed by Martyl Langsdorf.

She went on to become the “Bulletin’s” art director, while her husband, Alexander, worked with Enrico Fermi’s group to develop the hydrogen bomb at the University of Chicago in 1941.

A Very Graphic Novel

Crush and UnCrush

Two tech ads, making oppositional claims but this NYT article finds similarity in both: rot.

Crush: Apple’s IPad

“Uncrush”: Samsung Galaxy S9 series

Adult Bullying

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