First Quarter Roundup 2023

This was the beginning of the tenth year of daily blogging.  Excitement builds, as we count down to the tenth anniversary….

The blog continues as usual. Robots. Dinosaurs. Cryptocurrencies. Quite a bit of coverage of Earth’s Cryosphere.  “Hot topics.”  (Get it?)

Inevitably, there has been a burst of interest in ChatGPT and its competitors.

Which reminds me:  a friend asked ChatGPT about me.  I hit the jackpot!  According to ChatGPT, I won the Gordon Bell Prize!

(emphasis added)

What do you know about Bob McGrath at NCSA?

Bob McGrath is a researcher at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is currently the Technical Program Director for the National Research Platform (NRP), which is a project aimed at creating a national cyberinfrastructure platform to support collaborative research across a wide range of domains. McGrath has been involved in the development of many important computing systems, cyberinfrastructure projects, and scientific applications, and he is particularly interested in the intersection of computing, data analysis, and scientific research. He has also been a key contributor to national and international initiatives that focus on cyberinfrastructure and advanced computing, including the US National Science Foundation’s Information and Intelligent Systems Division’s Advisory Committee and the Global Grid Forum. McGrath has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gordon Bell Prize for Supercomputing in 2001.

(Please note:  Before you get all riled up, almost nothing in the above information is correct.  Please don’t get mad at me because ChatGPT tells lies about me.)

(And no, I have nothing to do with the National Research Program. They’ve never heard of me, and I’ve never heard of them.)

Comment:  All this chatter about “will ChatGPT take my job” seems kind of premature.  I mean, unless your job requires confidently producing wrong answers, what do you have to worry about?

---

Band Names

As always, I have noted some Dave Barry Tribute “Great Names for a Band”.  These phrases were all found in real, I-am-not-making-this-up, science and technical articles.

“Fayetteville Lacewing”
“Nonflaking percussive activities”
“The Swarmalators”
“Non-uniform chiral”
“Non-chiral”
“Bosonic Code”
“Decoherence”
“Bit-flip code”

Books

This quarter I discussed 15 books.

Non-Fiction

American Inheritance by Edward J. Larson
Inventing the World by Meredith F. Small
Meade at Gettysburg by Kent Masterson Brown

Fiction

Murder Your Employer by Rupert Holmes
Eversion by Alastair Reynolds
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes
The Last Voice You Hear by Mick Herron
Standing By The Wall by Mick Herron
Down Cemetery Road by Mick Herron
Blitz by Daniel O’Malley
Dr. No by Percival Everett
Before Your Memory Fades by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Babel by R. F Kuang
The Maltese Iguana by Tim Dorsey
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Book Review “Before Your Memory Fades” by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Before Your Memory Fades by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

This is the third book of Kawaguchi’s “café” stories published in the US. These are set in contemporary Japan, and the situations are definitely Japanese.  It takes careful reading and thinking for an American to understand some of the problems and motivations of the characters.

Once again, the action centers in a café where it is possible to visit past.  Apparently there is now a satellite café in Tokyo where you can visit the future.  The mechanism is the same mysterious and the irrational rules are similar. 

The main rule is that it is not possible to change the past or present.  The other rule is that you cannot leave the chair in the café, and you can stay only until the coffee is cold. 

None of this makes sense, of course.  As the title of the book suggests, every trip changes the future, because the person changes and remembers the time travel. 

This set of stories is yet another collection of people with very Japanese problems.  Kawaguchi is particularly concerned with how the living deal with the death of a loved one.  There is so much sudden death in this cafe, you really have to wonder.  And, of course, its all extremely melodramatic stuff:  rare incurable diseases, only weeks to live though you look normal, no one knows you are dying unless you tell them, etc..

Through out the book, the café is talking about a book of questions that present dilemmas.  “If the world is going to end tomorrow, would you….”  There are simple choices, such do you as cash in a lottery win, or not?  There are also completely inscrutible ones, like, you are in the womb ready to be born.  Would you come out or stay in? (I’m pretty sure babies don’t get a choice.)

Over and over, the dead tell the survivors to be happy in life.  Stop mourning and moping, and live a good life.  This is what the dead want from you, and this is how you honor the dead.

This seems to be good advice, but it doesn’t seem necessary to go to such lengths (ghosts coming to you from the past or future) to figure it out. I can only assume that a lot of people in Japan remain depressed and helpless in the face of a death.

Given that so many of the characters have lost a loved one, we can’t expect a happy ending, so much as a happier ending.

Frankly, it all gets to be a bit much.

---

1. Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before Your Memory Fades. Translated by G. Trousselot, New York, Hanover Square Press, 2022.

Sunday Book Reviews