A Visit to the Vet

It was Winston’s turn to go to the vet this morning for a checkup and rabies shot. He is not at high risk for rabies, but we have raccoons and rats in the neighborhood and if he ever got out of the house he might get exposed.

Dogs don’t like going to the vet either, but they like being with their people. Cats could really not care less about their people when the vet’s involved and it’s trauma, trauma, trauma all the way home.

He’s back in the house now, doing a thorough grooming session to sort himself out before a nap.

Storm At Dawn

A monsoonal weather system has come up from the south over California today, and around dawn this morning we had thunder and lightning and a few drops of rain. It cleared up by midday and we were able to set up the solar cooker this afternoon to prepare some lentils. The thunderstorms are now over the northern Sierras bringing with them a risk of wildfires.

Here is a view of the clouds this morning, taken a little after 7 AM from the food coop parking lot.

From Guinea Pigs to Hummingbirds

Yesterday was the last day of August. I had promised myself to complete a (rough!) first draft of my Mister Ginger comic by the end of the day, and I more or less did.

I now have a new task, one whose deadline is September 24th. I’ve been invited to submit a 6-page comic for another SAW anthology entitled Field Notes. I’m going to take some of the hummingbird drawings I did and arrange them thematically on six pages. This book is going to be even smaller than the last one, so my plan is to have one large panel per page.

At left is some of the doodling I’ve been doing for the title page. I am toying with versals. Since I’m going to be working at least at 200% I was playing with larger paper, which is definitely a challenge.

Below are the postcards I painted last Birdtober from which I am drawing the material for this comic. Nice to have most of the research for this project done and dusted.

Metro Systems That Ought To Exist

Metro systems are one of the great urban inventions but unfortunately there seems to be a minimum urban size before they get built. That doesn’t mean they can’t be designed in imagination. A YouTuber by the name of Helio Roque has started a project entitled “planeando metros que no existen” and has designed three of these so far, the cities being Badajoz, Salamanca, and Benidorm. Here he presents the creation of his map for Salamanca.

Sailor Fude

I’ve been working on the ancillary characters of the Mr. Ginger story. Slavic people tend to have round faces and large eyes. This is a gross oversimplification but I was looking for faces online that I could draw quickly to try and approximate this.

Because I’m going to be working at double size, I needed a thicker line than my Pilot Metropolitan could give me. My Sailor Fude pen has a bent nib which allows for four different line weights. Working on hot press watercolor paper is hard — the ink needed a bit of coaxing — but I like the effect. It’s sort of cartoony without my intending it to be so.

I will also be trying Bristol board but I’m thinking this might work well. Still unsure about whether to hand letter the text. (Or whether to hand letter it, digitize it, and set it that way…)

Technically Sweet

When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.
— J. Robert Oppenheimer

I am not the first to link this Oppenheimer quote to recent developments in AI but it seems quite apt. It is striking how quickly this era of generative AI has come about. The landmark paper presenting the theoretical architecture (Attention Is All You Need) behind large language models (i.e. ChatGPT and its relatives) was published in 2017. ChatGPT itself was released in November 2022, scaling up in complexity from the prototype model presented in the Attention paper by a factor of about 800.

The arrival of generative AI for images and video is another case of rapid evolution, well presented in a Stephen Welch YouTube video on the theory behind these technologies. Today there are numerous systems for generating video from text descriptions, but it took several mathematical breakthroughs in the past five years to get to these. For instance in February 2021 research was published describing a training method for placing images and their text descriptions in the same high-dimensional numerical space, but that was just the initial step in image generation, let alone video creation.

But the model built for the 2021 research was trained on 400 million pairs of images with corresponding text, scraped from we don’t know where. This week one of the big AI companies, Anthropic, settled out of court a major copyright class action lawsuit concerning the company’s use of millions of pirated books. Also this week, a wrongful death lawsuit was filed against the company OpenAI detailing how ChatGPT coached a teenager in committing suicide. Meanwhile, it has become clear that large language model-driven systems have security flaws that one can drive proverbial trucks through. And it has become incredibly easy to use text-to-image AI systems to create fake photographs for propaganda purposes. Pursuing the technically sweet has gotten well ahead of ethics. Again.

Flow

A prompt from SAWgust yesterday was to depict our Flow, our Process. This is my attempt to depict mine. It’s not very efficient.

I’m trying to get as much done as I can on Mister Ginger before Sunday night, and it’s slow. Paper is definitely faster, but if I do it digitally it’s a lot easier to edit. It doesn’t mean I don’t have bits of paper all over the house.

One thing is, my deadline is self-imposed. I have no idea what I’m doing with this thing other than giving a copy to Mister Ginger’s former owners. But I do have time to get this right, or as right as I can.

The Soul of an Egg

The Vuelta a España finally arrived in Spain today, with a team time trial that circumnavigated the small city of Figueres. Figueres is famous for being the home town of Salvador Dalí, and also the site of a museum dedicated to his works, designed by Dalí himself. The team time trial started at the museum itself, and we were treated to many helicopter camera views of the museum, which in good surrealist fashion has a set of giant eggs on the roof.

Egg sculptures make for fun landscape art. Here in Davis on the university campus, there is a series of egghead sculptures by the sculptor Robert Arneson. The photo here shows a pair of eggheads entitled “See No Evil/Hear No Evil”. These are situated between the administration building and the law school, and neither of them have ears.

Figueres and Davis are not the only places in the world with egg sculptures. In a bay by the village of Djúpivogur in Iceland, there is a set of 34 giant eggs on plinths paying homage to the nesting birds in the region.

Riding the Vuelta with no Nose Hairs

The Vuelta a España isn’t in Spain yet despite the fact that this is day 4. (Started in Turin, today’s finish line was in the French Alps; this isn’t Spain.) As usual I tune in to Spanish TV in order to watch it, with my buddies Carlos González (a journalist) and Perico Delgado, who was a big racing cyclist in the 90s, when huge thighs were all the rage.

The guys were laughing yesterday and again today about Victor Campenaerts’ obsession with aerodynamism, calling him a “friki” (best translation would be nerd, I think). I mean all the riders do this, and millions of dollars have been spent refining bikes, gear, helmets, and so on to reduce drag to a minimum, but Campenaerts takes this to the next level. He has a vlog where he shows plucking his nose hairs. This isn’t for aerodynamic advantage, but rather, he believes, in order to allow more air into the lungs.

But why, said Carlos and Perico, does he add to drag by having a mustache?

A Visitor From The Grapevines

Last Wednesday (20 August) we got to admire this moth all day long when Pica discovered it resting on a t-shirt hanging on the laundry line out back. This is an achemon sphinx moth (Eumorpha achemon) in the family Sphingidae. Their caterpillars feed on wild and cultivated grapes. Its presence makes sense because we have grapevines along the fencing on two sides of our yard, though we have never observed a caterpillar in the vines. The moth left the t-shirt some time over the night.