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?

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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: “Dr. No” by Percival Everett

Dr. No by Percival Everett

This isn’t a remake of the 007 story, not specifically, anyway.  To quote “The Critic”, “This is cute… This is cute… This is nice… What the hell is it?”

The plot is absurdist—though not far off from the usual double nought film.  It’s a book -ength linguistic joke, riffing on the ways we use the word “nothing”.  It’s a book-length mathematical shaggy dog story, riffing on the strangeness of what mathematicians “know”.  (Actually, there is a dog, too, but he’s not very shaggy.)

The whole thing makes no sense.  But, like The Critic and other absurdist fare, it’s pretty funny once you get into it.

And the “joke” is, as the novel concludes, “Nothing happened.” (p. 262)

So, yeah.  It’s kind of funny.  But, unfortunately, this comedy really pushed my buttons.

I mean, what would you do if a billionaire who aspires to be a bond villain decided to recruit you for his evil schemes?  OK, what would a math professor do?  And then what would happen?  It’s all so silly.

Some of the parody seems to lean on word play that isn’t really that profound.  Yeah, the word “nothing” is used in a lot of ways in English, most of them are (a) not relevant to formal mathematics any more than any other idiom is and (b) aren’t related to each other in any way.

Some of the dialog is about as funny as “who’s on first”.  Which is funny once, but gets old fast.

The weird logic of the word “nothing” is something of a parody of abstract mathematics and / abstract semantics.  So?  Who cares?

Much of the math terminology seems to be just words that the author picked to sound funny.  Which is funny once, but gets old.  It’s also a bit of a slander on real mathematics which makes up terminology in good faith, and with the purpose of making meaning clear, not sounding clever.  Ridiculing technical jargon is just plain anti-science.

The main character is portrayed as a math professor, considered a genius by other mathematicians (who can’t understand him).  This is a slander on math professors.  This character actually resembles English professors (the author is one), who, in fact do futz around with this kind mushy and poorly reasoned musing about everyday language.  But the story wouldn’t be as “funny” if this was just another BS-ing English professor, would it?

There is also trivial political satire, and what appears to be some kind of very faintly seen complaint about systemic racism in America.  When everything is a joke, it’s hard to know what is supposed to be serious.

Overall, I enjoyed the silliness.  But then, I enjoy 007 movies, despite the absurd plots and idiot characters.

I did not enjoy the parody, though.  It wasn’t that funny, and whatever serious point might be intended, I didn’t get it. And I resent the shallow, borderline anti-intellectual ridiculing of academic mathematicians.

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1. Percival Everett, Dr. No, Minneapolis, Graywolf Press, 2022.

Sunday Book Reviews