Peter Pan by Peter Watts

Catching up with Peter Watts’ blog, in a post about recent projects he’s worked on he included the full text of “the legendary Watts story ‘Peter Pan’, written in 2011, available only in Polish.”.

The full tale behind the writing of ‘Peter Pan’ is available here, but here’s the entire story itself:

Peter Pan

by

Peter Watts

Following the guide-line to the Orbital Hilton’s guest airlock, thirteen-year old Alvin Katz had time for one last thought as the micrometeorite punched through his faceplate, his face, and the back of his head on its return to the eternal void:

This had to be the worst bar-mitzvah ever.

As a storyline to open an episode opener of For All Mankind season 5, that has possibilities. Much will depend upon whether Alvin Katz turns out to be a relative of an existing character from the show. And possibly also which planet that Orbital Hilton ends up being in orbit around.

Hopefully Watts is safe from ‘Peter Pan’ being turned into the latest epic saga from visionary filmmaker Zack Snyder, set to be released early in 2025 but followed with an extra-long mature version later that year.

Black Mirror season 7?

Surely the Friend Reveal Trailer is going to turn out to be a promo for Black Mirror season 7?

Isn’t it?

[Edited to add link to relevant story at The Verge]

Project 1921 / 1973 / 2025

If we can tear our eyes away from the early days of the Starmer government and cast an eye upon other big electoral events in 2024, we find Rick Perlstein providing some much-needed perspective on Project 2025’s antecedents:

One thing that especially grates on me as a historian is how much of the discourse treats Project 2025 as if it’s some novel thing. I mean, what about Project 1921?

I refer, of course, to the administration of Warren G. Harding, who intoned in his inaugural address of dedicating himself to “the omission of unnecessary interference of Government with business.”

Not so much a radical new idea as it is the latest incarnation of several long-standing right wing objectives, then.

With the Conservative party’s MPs about to see whose turn it is to succeed Rishi Sunak, how long will it be until some Tufton Street think tank brings us a report proclaiming that Project 2029 ¹ is the way forward for the UK?

The fungus expects to be repaid

Go read Doug Muir’s Fungal banking at Crooked Timber. Fascinating stuff:

So in the last couple of decades we’ve discovered that many plants rely on networks of soil fungi to bring them critical trace nutrients. This is a symbiotic relationship: the fungal network can access these nutrients much better than plants can, and in return the plants provide the fungus with other stuff — particularly energy, in the form of glucose sugar, made from photosynthesis.

It turns out this relationship is particularly important for large, long-lived trees. That’s because trees spend years as seedlings, struggling in the shade of their bigger relatives. If they’re going to survive, they’ll need help.

The fungal network gives them that help. The fungus not only provides micronutrients, it actually can pump glucose into young seedlings, compensating for the sunlight that they can’t yet reach. This is no small thing, because the fungus can’t produce glucose for itself! Normally it trades nutrients to trees and takes glucose from them in repayment. So it’s reaching into its own stored reserves to keep the baby seedling alive.

Gosh that’s beautiful isn’t Nature great! Well… yes and no.

Because the fungus isn’t doing this selflessly. The nutrients and glucose aren’t a gift. They’re a loan, and the fungus expects to be repaid […]

Doug Muir has contributed a terrific run of posts about science to Crooked Timber lately. Miles away from the stuff of politics that the site normally publishes, but right up my street. Well worth a read.

Starring The Computer

Filling a gap that the Internet Movie Database is never going to cater for: Starring The Computer.

Starring the Computer is a website dedicated to the use of computers in film and television. Each appearance is catalogued and rated on its importance (ie. how important it is to the plot), realism (how close its appearance and capabilities are to the real thing) and visibility (how good a look does one get of it). Fictional computers don’t count (unless they are built out of bits of real computer), so no HAL9000 - sorry.

I’m unsurprised that the Sinclair QL only shows up in Micro Men.

[Via MetaFilter]

The wrong room

In the wake of news of the Trump hush money trial’s verdict, Alexandra Petri’s satire on the jury’s deliberations is still well worth a read.

Juror 1: Okay, gentlemen. We can do this a number of ways. We can discuss and then vote. Or we can take a preliminary vote, see where we stand and then discuss. Our result has to be 12 to nothing, either way.

Juror 3: Let’s do a preliminary vote. Maybe we can all go home.

[Eleven hands go up. All heads swivel to Juror 8, sitting at the end of the table with his hand firmly on its surface.]

If you find your view of the article blocked by ads, give thanks for Instapaper if you have it. ¹

[Via The Overspill]

Daylight DC-1

If the Daylight DC-1 proves to look as good in real life as it does in their launch video then it’s going to be a seriously tempting proposition.

Give me a touch-responsive monochrome E-Ink screen that refreshes at 60 frames per second and I can live without it displaying those images in colour.¹ Granted the operating system is a tweaked version of Android, which is not ideal,² but it’s also not that big a deal.

Part of me would prefer that the launch of the DC-1 was followed shortly after by the launch of a DC-1 Mini, matching that screen with the immensely more practical form factor of my beloved iPad Minis, but I’ve learned by now not to expect the tablet market to follow my little whims on that front.

[Via Daring Fireball]

Run, Bezos, run

Doug Muir over at Crooked Timber, recounts a recent thought experiment:

A transcript from memory of an evening conversation with my two older sons:

“I heard that Jeff Bezos could run through the streets every day, throwing hundred dollar bills in the air, and he’d still be making money.”

“I wonder if that’s true?”

[…]

Pretty sure it is true, but it’s good to see the workings-out that led my thoughts in that same direction.

As one commenter pointed out:

David in Tokyo 05.07.24 at 8:39 am The freaky thing about JB is that he had to give up half his wealth to divorce his wife to cavort with younger women, but he bounced back to the top almost immediately.

Is My Toddler a Stochastic Parrot?

I am reliably informed¹ that Angie Wang’s New Yorker cartoon pondering the question Is my toddler a stochastic parrot? earned her a Pulitzer nomination last year.

Seems like a reasonable nomination. Had I been aware of the cartoon’s existence prior to getting word of it from today’s From The Editor’s Desk email, if the New Yorker’s content management system permitted it then I’d have happily thrown them US$1 to read the whole thing.² As it stands, that was my first look at the New Yorker’s web site for a bit so it was my one free look this month. Had I read something else at the New Yorker earlier this month, I’d have had to hope that someone had arranged for Archive.org to grab a copy.

One day our supposed “AI” successors may deem Angie Wang’s cartoon to be unbearably sentimental about her child’s development, but I can buy that what she’s seeing is not remotely like what LLMs are giving to the world.

Just because Large Language Models (LLMs) are at present a shiny new toy for executives who are willing to throw vast sums at the companies that claim to understand them in the hope of reaping efficiency gains, that doesn’t mean that a decade from now that particular bubble won’t have burst. Perhaps we’ll all look back on how much money was spent on LLMs when public services were starved for funding and feel bad about that.

[Via From The Editor’s Desk (The New Yorker)]

Oh, the Humanity

I’m indebted to The Overspill for sharing the intro to M. G. Siegler’s latest piece on the Apple Vision Pro:

Arguing about the shipment projections for Apple’s Vision Pro is sort of like arguing about how many tickets were sold on the fateful Hindenburg journey.[¹] For one thing, we’re going to find out the number one way or another, eventually.[²] For another, we’re sort of overlooking the massive airship exploding in the sky.

[Footnote links omitted from this quotation since this is a paid subscriber post at Spyglass, so we non-subscribers can’t see that content.¹]

On the one hand, we’re still a few months on from the release to actual paying customers of the Apple Vision Pro. On the other, rumours that the Vision Pro won’t see a hardware update until late 2026 do suggest that the Apple faithful are going to look back on this experience as an extended beta test of an idea that the world wasn’t ready for yet. The Vision Pro may be seen as a testbed for ideas that will reappear down the line in other products. Like the Xerox Alto was.

[Via The Overspill]

Smart in theory

Now the embargo on reviews of the Humane Ai Pin has come to an end, Humane might be wishing it hadn’t. Let Cherlynn Low at Engadget stand as an example of what’s out there:

[Low is describing the way you find yourself needing to enter a number in order to validate your identity multiple times a day, on a device that lacks a keypad so has to project numbers onto the palm of your hand. Sounds complicated, but I’m sure Humane’s designers thought users would get used to it over time.]

This gesture is smart in theory but it’s very sensitive. There’s a very small range of usable space since there is only so far your hand can go, so the distance between each digit is fairly small. One wrong move and you’ll accidentally select something you didn’t want and have to go all the way out to delete it.

“Smart in theory” That damning phrase might serve as Humane’s epitaph.

Given how frequently the response to reading about the Ai Pin seems to be some variation of “what does this do that my smartphone can’t do better and faster?”, three thoughts arise:

1. Displacing the smartphone is going to take quite some doing; and,
2. Paying Humane US$699 for the Ai Pin itself, plus a monthly bill for the supporting cell service/gateway to off-device network services, is a sign that some people have more money than sense;¹ and,
3. Are we 100% certain that the founders of Humane weren’t sent on a kamikaze mission by Apple to remind us all of how useful smartphones are?

Of course, almost everyone asking about using a smartphone to accomplish similar goals has not yet had hands-on experience of using an Ai Pin. Perhaps using the device in real life will transform opinions. That’s not the impression I get watching Joanna Stern’s 90 second video review on Twitter/X, but it’s early days yet.

[Via Daring Fireball]

View Source

Gary Ings’ article in HTML Review issue 3, a view source web, takes me back:

On my personal websites view source meant being able to adapt and remix ideas. Like drawing a map, elements and pages acted as landmarks in the browser to be navigated between. As a self-initiated learner, being able to view source brought to mind the experience of a slow walk through someone else’s map.

It’s also very nicely presented. Look at it on a decent web browser and be impressed.¹

View Source on modern web browsers tends to reveal a whole heap of custom CSS, so it can take some digging to get down to the HTML building blocks of the article you’re reading. I’m glad I taught myself HTML in those simpler times.

Nowadays 99% of what I post here I write in Markdown² because that’s the core of what I’m trying to communicate here: the words and hyperlinks with the occasional embedded image or video. Nobody will learn very much by using View Source on this content, I’m afraid.

[Via Pixel Envy]