30 August 25
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…)
29 August 25
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.
28 August 25
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.
27 August 25
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.
26 August 25
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?
25 August 25
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.
24 August 25
Happy Birthday to Me
Yesterday was my birthday. I’ve been thinking about the lettering for my Mister Ginger comic and don’t have a satisfactory italic nib. This pen writes like butter and I think it was a great choice!
Numenius gave me a gift, a way to get us through some very troubled times. Keep your claws sharp….
23 August 25
Guinea Pigs At The Chalkboard
Pica working on her comic about the guinea pig Mr. Ginger reminded me of a story about the great twentieth-century geneticist and evolutionary biologist, Sewall Wright. This is recounted in Jim Endersby’s book A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology which covers a lot more than just guinea pigs: rather it is a history of biology told from the point of view of the subject organisms (there are chapters on fruit flies, corn, and many other species in addition to guinea pigs).
A couple of interesting facts about guinea pigs before I get to the Sewall Wright story.
- When guinea pigs were imported from the New World the English took quite a fancy to them. Queen Elizabeth I even had one as a pet.
- They were important study animals in the discovery of vitamin C and its role in the prevention of scurvy. Like humans but unlike rats and mice, guinea pigs do not synthesize their own vitamin C, so they are good subjects for this topic.
- The eminent twentieth-century British biologist JBS Haldane studied guinea pigs for a while because his sister took up keeping guinea pigs after she developed an allergy to horses. (They were an upper-class family.) Their lawn didn’t have croquet hoops or tennis nets, rather there were about 300 guinea pigs running loose behind the fencing. The genetics experiments came to a tragic end in the penultimate generation when a friend’s fox terrier jumped the front gate and frightened all the guinea pigs to death. (Incidentally, Haldane was a British communist who like many of his compatriots including George Orwell went over to Spain to fight the Fascists).
Together with JBS Haldane and R.A. Fisher, Sewall Wright (1889-1988) was one of the three key figures in developing the mathematical theory of evolution in the first half of the twentieth century. I first heard of him in my undergrad courses around 1982 and 1983 on population genetics and evolutionary biology. Wright was still alive at that point. I more recently ran across him while reading Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie’s popularization of the theory of causal inference, The Book of Why. Wright in 1921 developed the mathematical technique of path analysis, which is an important precursor to causal inference theory.
Wright fell into working with guinea pigs because he was offered a position as a graduate student to be a caretaker of a research colony of the animals, and he kept working with them for most of his career. The following story about Wright is apocryphal, and according to his biographer William Provine the story isn’t true, but is fun to relate nonetheless. As background, although Wright was incredibly conscientious and generous with his time, he was not a very good lecturer. This is quoted from an interview with a student of Wright’s, the paleontologist Robert Sloan:
I didn’t see this, but my friend and partner, Ernie Lundelius, who was one of the groomsmen in my wedding, describes a case where Wright brought in a guinea pig. He was displaying the guinea pig and showing some of the variations in coat color. This particular guinea pig was somewhat more fractious than usual and was scurrying around on the desk and was not about to be quiet. When Wright worked at the blackboard, traditionally he tucked an eraser in his left armpit. And to keep the guinea pig quiet, he tucked the guinea pig in his left armpit. And when he was through and ready to erase some space so that he could put the next equation down, he reached for the eraser and grabbed the guinea pig and started to erase the blackboard with a squeaking guinea pig. Of course, this was one of the tales that went around among all the students of evolution. Whether they had been there or not, I doubt it ever got into print. It deserves to be there, as part of at least the bibliography of Sewall Wright.
22 August 25
A Big Part of Our Lives
Feathers of Hope was neglected for a long while but we’re both glad to be back to our alternating daily posting practice. One of the things we never did here was introduce the no-longer new cats. Charlie and Diego both died before we moved into town; we had been living here for a few months and decided we needed cats back in our lives.
The SAWgust prompt today was “Companions,” a pet tax asking about our pets. Here’s my entry from today, along with the photo at left:
Two gray cats that were rescued as kittens from under a pallet behind Walmart when it was blisteringly hot. Very different personalities… Winston is big and muscular, with a meow that is much higher and pitiful than his ballbuster persona would imply, and Esmerelda aka Esme aka Missy who always always looks scruffy even after you’ve brushed her.
ETA this was taken in winter; there is no way they’d be this close today even in the coolish pre-dawn hours….
21 August 25
The Domestic LLM
One of the reasons I built my own computer recently was to have a machine available considerably more powerful than my laptop so that I can learn about and experiment with current technology. I am now playing around with large language models (aka LLMs) which is the key technology behind ChatGPT and its rivals. As widely recognized, these state-of-the-art systems consume enormous amounts of resources to build and keep running. What’s less widely known is that smaller versions of these same models are continually being released as freely available downloads for community experimentation, research, and development. Many of these open models are still far too large to run at home, but many others will run happily on ordinary home computers (albeit the more powerful your graphics card is, the better off you are). I’ve been learning a great deal experimenting with these. Some of the things I’ve learned are:
- There is an enormous amount of development going on across this whole space. There are tools and approaches available now that would have been really useful to me professionally a year-and-a-half ago.
- Nobody really understands how this technology works. An example: I asked my local LLM to write a poem in iambic tetrameter about the cat sleeping on his cat bed in my office. After some nudging (the first version was in iambic pentameter, but I told it to try again), it succeeded in producing some doggerel with the correct scansion. How did the system do this? We have no idea. We cannot point to a “metrical poetry” module within the system — rather, we are seeing emergent behavior.
- It is straightforward to set up an LLM system (even one at home) to let you conversationally ask questions and get natural language responses about a body of documents. (My test corpus has been a set of 80 or so conservation management plans from California). What is not at all straightforward is getting responses that are reliably accurate. Enormous amounts of engineering effort across every domain is being expended right now to build reliable conversational systems, but for now this is both very challenging and expensive.
- It is not clear what the important real-world applications of local LLM systems (i.e. ones you can run on a laptop or desktop) are going to be. There are a great deal of privacy benefits to them, since you can avoid shipping your sensitive documents off to Meta/Google/OpenAI etc. for LLM-based analyses, but will the local systems be powerful enough to conduct the analyses? One application of much interest to me is extracting structured information from unstructured or semi-structured text documents. This has been a challenge I’ve been pondering for quite a number of years, and LLM-based techniques for doing this are just starting to emerge.