1 December 25
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.
30 November 25
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.
29 November 25
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.
28 November 25
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.
27 November 25
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.
26 November 25
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…
25 November 25
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.
24 November 25
23 November 25
Neocolor IIs Arrive!
At last week’s sketchcrawl, I did a sketch using a small set of Caran D’Ache Neocolor II water-soluble wax crayons. Working with these crayons was interesting enough to warrant ordering a bigger set, and this arrived today. I quickly swatched out the set, and the swatch chart is shown at left. There are thirty colors in the set, and I added a couple of other colors as singles to the collection (Payne’s Gray and Sepia). Now I get to play and experiment to see how they fit into all the other sketching media I use!
22 November 25
Still Kicking and Screaming, But More Softly
I had the second of my Comix Activism classes today, in which we discussed Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, which is reportedly the most banned book in the United States at the moment. (Not sure why: it handles a difficult subject sensitively and gently and from a completely personal point of view.)
Our drawing prompt was to look at something that has changed for us recently. The comic at right was the result of mine; I am persevering with The Artist’s Way despite my misgivings. I do find that if I make sure I give myself enough time to journal, it goes well. (It still does take me close to an hour to do three pages.)
Whatever the cause, I am finding myself drawing more, especially more comics. Yesterday I rescued a worm and it became another 4-panel comic. So, yay?