A Package from France

I met a friend for coffee this morning at Mishka’s (I don’t consider myself an expert in coffee but this European-style coffee shop seems to serve the best cappuccino in Davis). When I got home a book had arrived from Paris, a comic about climate change which has been assigned in my Comix Activism class. (The assigned book is actually an English translation but a quick bit of research revealed that the author was French, had interviewed multiple climate change scientists for the book who were also all French, so I decided to get a copy. In French.)

This is the kind of comic I’d like to write, though I shudder at the long, long hours it must have taken him, years even. Although I find the type treatment a bit fussy for a language with so many diacritics and (still) dislike zipatone screens, the art is gorgeous. So far, it’s very readable and engaging. (Love the opening sentence of Flaubert’s Salammbô being quoted on page 2.)

Genealogical Rabbitholes

I really ought to enter a lot more of my genealogy into WikiTree. I have entered four people in there, including myself. No matter — I can find ancestors of mine who are already entered into WikiTree, and learn from there.

Here is the WikiTree entry for Hosea Curtice (b. 1739), about whom I wrote a couple days ago. (I come from a long line of Hosea Curtices, so I have to specify the birth date). He was married to Susannah Kellogg, whose genealogy leads in interesting directions. 1) She is part of the Kellogg family, which in another century brings us to Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and in this past century to the Kellogg Foundation. 2) You can trace a connection from Susannah Kellogg to Emily Dickinson. I am quite proud to have Emily Dickinson as my cousin, as the title of our blog would imply. 3) Susannah’s great-grandfather Samuel Kellogg (b. 1669) was kidnapped by Indians in 1677 and hauled off to Canada, eventually to be ransomed out of captivity. His mother Sarah Day was killed in the raid where Samuel was captured. Sarah Day is also the common ancestor I share with Emily Dickinson, through an earlier marriage of Sarah’s.

This raid happened in the aftermath of King Philip’s War, and there is an account of it on the website for the wonderful book Our Beloved Kin: Remapping A New History of King Philip’s War, by Lisa Brooks. I need to reread her book: it’s an illuminating journey into 17th century Indigenous geographies.

Unflattening

Numenius drew my attention last week to a book by Nick Sousanis entitled Unflattening. This was originally his doctoral dissertation (!) but written entirely as a comic, looking to explore new ways of seeing. When you only are given one path — one perspective — you are blind to the myriad other possibilities, other ways, other directions, other modes of thinking.

The book is very dense and I just picked it up this morning from our local indie bookstore, so I haven’t finished it yet, but this is one I’ll be returning to again and again. Douglas Wolk calls it a “genuine oddity, a philosophical treatise in comics form.” Imagine my delight when I learned that it was published by my former employer, Harvard University Press… the notes at the back are worth the price of admission on their own, illustrated as they are with thumbnails and drafts of his pages.

In The Wake of Ethnic Cleansing

The most haunting bit for me of The American Revolution documentary came in Episode 5, covering 1778 through 1780. In 1779 Washington sent a third of his army into western New York with the aim of destroying Iroquois settlements there. To quote from Washington’s orders to Major General John Sullivan (this was known as the Sullivan Expedition or the Sullivan Campaign): “The immediate objects are the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” They destroyed 40 villages and drove 5,000 Iroquois west towards Fort Niagara controlled by the British.

I had known about the Sullivan Campaign previously but watching the episode I realized with angst that the aftermath of the campaign probably intersected with my family history. I looked up the details and my hunch was right. One line of my family goes back to 17th century New England; these ancestors migrated westward until around the 1820s they ended up in Lorain County, Ohio where they settled for a century-and-a-half. One of these westward hops was to the town of Locke, in Cayuga County, New York. Locke was founded in 1790, and in 1803 or thereabouts my ancestor Hosea Curtice (born 1739) moved to that town. Locke is a few kilometers east of Cayuga Lake; in September 1779 Sullivan’s soldiers destroyed the Cayuga villages on the east side of the lake. Lands in the Finger Lakes region were designated as bounty lands for New York’s soldiers in 1781, and the Locke township was named by 1790.

The American Revolution (Ken Burns Series)

We finished watching the final of six two-hour-long episodes about the American Revolution today. I must say it’s been eye-opening (I didn’t learn much about it in school in England), and I’ve particularly been interested to hear the Native American and African American scholars’ contributions to the project. (The slaughter of Native Americans during what became a colonizing, imperial effort by the leaders of the Revolution was highlighted and sickening; I’m told American teenagers don’t get told this story much in history classes either.)

What has particularly impressed me about this series is the storytelling, much of it done through original paintings but a great deal of which was filled in with watercolors by Greg Harlin, whose depiction of the encamped Continental Army during a harsh winter — I can’t remember if it was at Valley Forge or Morristown) is shown above. These paintings have been a great complement to drone footage, maps, and still photos or footage of colonial interiors. The letters and accounts by soldiers from both sides, from politicians, from enslaved men and women, and from colonial women whether loyalist or rebel, have been brilliantly woven together. What an editing job this must have been…

The American Revolution was driven by ideas. It was a product of the Enlightenment. As the democracy that was born of this great and costly experiment lies under ever-greater threat, it’s good to look back into what it was all about. I’m glad we’ve taken the time to do this.

Pomegranate In Neocolors

This week I’ve been continuing to practice with my new set of Neocolor II water-soluble crayons. Here is a sketch I did a couple days ago of a dried pomegranate. This is the one Neocolor II sketch I’ve done on cold press watercolor paper; the others have all been on the much thinner Stillman and Birn Alpha paper.

Selfish Knitting

I’m knitting a jacket with two strands of aran-weight yarn held together to make a chunky, a weight I almost never use (laceweight or fingering is more my style). I picked up some habutai silk to line it with from Stonemountain & Daughter.

This is a time of year when a lot of people are doing stressful knitting, intended to be given as gifts. I’m glad not to be doing that at the moment… This will be a nice warm cropped jacket for me.

Epistemological Debt

There is a concept in software engineering called technical debt. Basically, this is something that accrues when taking shortcuts in building a software system. You solve the problem that is immediately at hand, but in so doing you neglect to think through edge cases and these come back to haunt you as use of the system expands and additional pieces get built out.

I think something analogous though more sinister occurs when working with large language models (e.g. ChatGPT and its rivals) which are the core of the AI boom. I’m calling this “epistemological debt”. LLMs are by design extremely good at returning plausibly sounding text, outputs that look correct on first glance but often contain some inaccuracies. For example, using AI-based transcripts and summaries of meetings are now commonplace: this is a standard function in Zoom these days. But what happens when the summaries get saved and become the official record of the meeting without anybody checking the generated text for the inaccuracies? Given that people are only getting more and more busy one suspects these failures to review happen all the time. The inaccuracies start to accumulate, and nobody can figure out what is truth and what is not.

Thanksgiving

Growing up in Spain, we didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving — nobody had the day off, and the only person in the family who was really American was my mother, and getting absolved of cooking massive meals 5 weeks apart felt like a relief to her. So I didn’t grow up with it.

This is one of those holidays that people are pretty aggressive about: if you’re not cooking, they issue you an invitation to join their own turkey extravaganza, and are pretty upset if you refuse. By now my friends in Davis know not to bother inviting two reluctant vegetarians (Oh! but we can do tofurkey especially for you!). So, I’m a card-carrying Thanksgiving grinch. I have nothing against the holiday itself, though native Americans I’ve known certainly do. It’s at least mostly non-commercial. But issuing in the frenzy of the weekend of spending: that really does seem worth getting away from, and we are participating in the #AintBuyingIt boycott.

I just went for a walk and took myself past the Davis Food Co-op, a place I visit often in the course of a week. It was a madhouse. I just kept right on walking and carried on around the neighborhood.

Our tradition on Thanksgiving day is to walk up Mix Canyon and then order take-out from our local favorite Indian restaurant. Happy Thanksgiving, if you celebrate…

On Painting and Thought

I’m continuing to explore sketching with my new Neocolor II crayons, and here is a painting I did today of one of the Sugar Bee apples from today’s grocery shop run. I’m starting to learn how the Neocolors work as their own distinct medium. They go on the paper very smoothly — it’s a wax crayon — and it’s easy to spread the pigments around with a wet paintbrush. Once the paper is dry again, you can draw on it with more crayon in another layer. I also picked up a trick from a video about drawing birds with Neocolor IIs. The artist in this video uses a plastic palette with a rough surface. After drawing on the rough surface with a crayon, one can pick up the pigment directly with a wet paintbrush, thus turning the crayon into what is effectively watercolor paint. This can solve some problems posed by only using the crayons directly on the paper, such as being able to create a smooth wash, or being able to paint details with a fine brush. I made up an instant rough palette surface by using steel wool on a yogurt container top, and tested this approach out.

It is interesting that learning how materials behave — in this case a new art medium — is as far as I can intuit is the domain of non-linguistic thought. When I wanted to add yellow spotting on top of the red of the apple, I just knew that my little rounded flat travel brush would be a good tool for this. I don’t believe language had anything to do with this thought.

This is a consequential realization because the trillions that are being invested right now in AI are being built for the most part on the manipulation of language. To the best of my knowledge the heart of today’s AI boom is large language models (LLMs). There was a piece published in The Verge today about how this is likely a philosophical error. The article is entitled “Large language mistake” and has the subheading “Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it.” The article draws upon a perspective piece published in Nature last year entitled “Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought”, arguing its case from contemporary neuroscience and linguistics. I’m not expecting AIs to know how to paint watercolor anytime soon.