Journal of No. 118

I haven't been keeping contemporaneous diaries of travel adventures for a while. This probably saves everyone a lot of time. But here's my take on our recent trip on Carnival Legend around the UK. Legend is among the smallest ships currently in the Carnival Fleet, and is just a tad bigger than the erstwhile Celebrity Galaxy, our first (and best) cruise experience. Just as a quick summary, Carnival did not make a good showing for us, the main letdown being the food in the main dining hall. On most cruises, these have been causes for celebration -- three or four courses with a schmancy-quality waitstaff and maybe even a sommelier. On Legend, there's no time for chitchat. The ordertakers take orders. Everything else about the cruise (including the casual dining options) was pretty good. Anyway, to the recap:

We flew into Heathrow and got the shuttle bus to Dover to get us on the ship. Neat to see the White Cliffs in the flesh, so to speak. I was out of sorts from the long flight, but a hamburger helped to sort me out -- only afterwards did I see that I'd been to Flavortown. The burger spot is Guy Fieri-branded (and Emeril has left his mark on the main dining room menus).

As we recombobulated from the flight, it was good to have a sea day the next day. Scout out the ship. Find the food. Find the booze. Find the reading spots. Find the minigolf course. Avoid the shops. Avoid the casino. Avoid the Fun Squad.

The following day, we were berthed at Cobh, Ireland, a short trainride from Cork. Once in Cork, we took the (packed) local bus to Blarney Castle. Like most days on the trip, the weather was rainy to drizzly in the morning, and gradually improving into the afternoon, when blue skies might appear. There was a 90 minute wait to go kiss the Blarney Stone, which wasn't that great an attraction for us anyway. But the Castle and Manor itself are surrounded by gardens, so we wandered through poisonous plants, carnivorous plants, ferns, and what not for a time before heading back to Cork. I thought we might do lunch at the English Market in Cork, but it was closed on Sundays. We found a friendly Irish pub for sandwiches and cider. We walked a bit more around Cork before returning to the ship. We probably should have spent more time in Cobh, which looked like it had some charm, but we were pretty beat by this point. As the ship left, though, we watched Cobh slip past and away from the deck. Saw some properly Emerald landscapes before we were out to sea pointing back across the Irish Sea.

In Holyhead, Wales we took the train to Bangor, and from there a bus to Caernarfon. Caernarfon Castle is really an amazing place. It looks brand-new, but is 700 years old (though I gather much of it was restored in the 19th century). Due to its completeness, visitors have almost complete run of the place. Climb every tower, walk every battlement. Some of the areas have historical exhibits and such inside. So we walked all over and inside the place until we were tired, and then back into the city for some ice cream. Back to the bus, back to the train, back to the ship, which again tacked the other way across the Irish Sea.

Alas, in the morning, the weather and waves were so rough that we had to skip Dublin entirely. Probably the stop I was most excited about. There was enough motion in the ship to be noticeable, especially in the long hallways along the cabins, where you found yourself being sucked by gravity to one side or the other as you tried to walk in a straight line. But honestly nothing that raised any discomfort or concern. So... another U-turn across the Irish Sea.

Liverpool turns out to be a great cruise port, mainly because the terminal is smack dab in the middle of everything. No trains or buses or trams to take to get you somewhere. You're right there. We walked along the Three Graces and the museums nearby We spent some time in the Maritime museum, which had rich displays on the Lusitania as well as more generally about WWI and WWII naval history. After some more walk through the streets, we entered the Western Approaches War Museum in Liverpool, in the underground facility in charge of protecting the British Coast in WWII. Again lots of great original artifacts, from a giant map room to an Enigma machine. A nice little mini-museum on the Wrens as well.

After that, we stopped for Brazilian Nachos, which were slow to come and we wolfed them down in order to make it to our 'Couples' Gin Making appointment at the Liverpool Gin Distillery. This turned out to be a great experience. Some history of gin and gin-making (accompanied by more gin and tonics than we could safely drink). We got our own little copper still, and our choice of botanicals to go in the mix. It was similar to our kitchen sink absinthe experiments, but a large notch more professional -- even to the extent of having a refractometer to measure the alcohol percentage. Once we had a little taste of our own medicine, we had a chance to name it. We had been struck by the Liver Birds on the Royal Liver Insurance building (one of the 3 Graces) and had learned it was the mythical cormorant-ish symbol of Liverpool, so we went with that as a name. We also got to apply the wax seal to the top. Back to the ship, where we had our Chef's Table appointment -- instead of dinner in the dining room, we had a special meal with a dozen cruisers overseen by one of the chefs. We toured the galley, which was just as hectic as one might imagine, but the pastry chef gave us a quick lesson in cake. The meal itself came in numerous courses, and the staff did a great job dealing with my picky eating. Definitely a highlight of food on the ship (the other one being the huevos rancheros at brunch). But not the trip as a whole. No disrespect to the chef, but we had lined up some Michelin-starred ringers for the next two days.

In Glasgow, we took our only excursion (since we're pretty confident taking buses and trains and what-not on our own). This went out just a hairsbreadth into the Highlands to visit Glengoyne Distillery, one of the minority of whisky distilleries still under Scottish ownership. Our local guide was quite a hoot. Crazy to think his straight job is as a professor. He oversaw a lot of US students, and apparently made an easy 5 pound a shot for recording voicemails as Shrek. The distillery gave us a great tour of the facility and the process and a wee dram or two of the local product. Good stuff. Dr. Pookie was happy to learn it's available at Total Wines.
The next short stop was at Loch Lomond. I'm afraid we had a romantic vision of 'the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.' For the locals, it's a spot for entertainment with paddleboats, minigolf, and a churro stand. Then back to the boat.

The ship was in Glasgow until the wee hours, so we had plenty of time to do more. I barely made it on the train waiting for us near the port, and then we walked a bit around the town. We stopped at the bar in Citizen for some excellent cocktails, before heading along to Unalome for dinner. Now I wish I had a more complete diary entry, but everything was lovely. Particularly, the duck dish, where the breast was prepared as well as any I've ever imagined, and the confit leg (or whatever it was) was likewise superlative. Beets and taters and raspberry as complements.

The next day in Belfast, we enjoyed St. George's Market, with everything from antiques to gigantic sandwiches on offer. Ultimately, we had an excellent lunch at OX, where again the attention to detail, presentation and flavor was astounding. Even the butter was the best butter in the entire world (thank you Irish cows). Afterwards, we strolled more around Belfast before getting back to the ship.

After Belfast, another day at sea, then back to Dover, and then to our little Z Hotel in Covent Garden for an extra half-or-so day in London. Spent more time at the British Museum -- it's been 34 years since we were last there, but heck, even the mummies are only 1% older, so they were just like old friends. Got Dr. Pookie some very authentic fish and chips before turning in and preparing for the trip home.

In the morning, the Tube to Heathrow and then on the giant flying metal tube for LA.

reference 

A Poe-em of Passion

IT was many and many a year ago,    
On an island near the sea,  
That a maiden lived whom you mightn’t know    
By the name of Cannibalee;  
And this maiden she lived with no other thought        
Than a passionate fondness for me.  

I was a child, and she was a child—    
Tho’ her tastes were adult Feejee—  
But she loved with a love that was more than love,    
My yearning Cannibalee,        
With a love that could take me roast or fried    
Or raw, as the case might be.    

And that is the reason that long ago,    
In that island near the sea,  
I had to turn the tables and eat        
My ardent Cannibalee—  
Not really because I was fond of her,    
But to check her fondness for me.    

But the stars never rise but I think of the size    
Of my hot-potted Cannibalee,        
And the moon never stares but it brings me nightmares    
Of my spare-rib Cannibalee;  
And all the night-tide she is restless inside,  
Is my still indigestible dinner-belle bride,  
In her pallid tomb, which is Me,        
In her solemn sepulcher, Me.

---

Lummis is quite a figure, particularly in Los Angeles history. LA Times editor, Head of the library, founder of the Southwest Museum, and builder of the Lummis House.

 Waking Nightmares is an anthology of Ramsey Campbell short stories. No particular theme to them, although many of them do have an element of dream logic that make them nightmarish. All good stuff. Interesting mix of protagonists. Beside the many good people to whom bad things happen are quite a few bad people to whom bad things happen.

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Some Assembly Required (DECODING FOUR BILLION YEARS OF LIFE, FROM ANCIENT FOSSILS TO DNA) by Neil Shubin

Another great science work by the discoverer of Tiktaalik. This one is more about some quirks (important ones) of evolution that defy the elementary cartoon picture of gradualism. That sometimes when it looks like a whole bunch of things have to come together for some 'leap' of evolution, that many of the enabling factors were already well in place, but now used for a new purpose.
Other sections talk about the importance of particular genes being influenced by control mechanisms within particular cell types:

I've solved the case in Disco Elysium (Final Cut), though that's probably the least exciting thing about the game. Part choose your own adventure; part Infocom plus some graphics; part psychopolitical meditation -- it's really sui generis and a great experience, if you're up for it. The game was originally "refused classification by the [Australian gam] Board, making it illegal to sell in the country, due to its depiction of sex, drug misuse or addiction, crime, cruelty, and violence, as well as showing "revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency, and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults""

I could try to say more, but it's like the Matrix -- you have to experience it for yourself. Great voice acting. Bonkers writing. There's enough depth in the decision trees that my replay has uncovered all sorts of novel things already, but I doubt there's so much that you could play it endlessly.

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Segueing into books, Virtual Cities is a nice midpoint. Subtitled An Atlas & Exploration of Video Game Cities, the book describes 45 game cities from 1983's Ant Attack to very recent games. The author has degrees in urban planning, so some of his commentary is an interesting take on how realistic the cities are as a place where humans could live. I guess I had hoped for more information on design, both the visual design of the cities from an art and graphics standpoint, and from a game design standpoint. While each entry has a short 'Design Insights' section that covers some of this, it's very brief. Most of the text is given up to sort of a in-world guidebook description of the cities. Sometimes this diegetic stance has some wry humor, especially if you know the game. But I can't say I've played a lot of these games, so often they come of as in-jokes you don't get.

Each city also has a pretty well-executed map. But where the book really fails is with the images. Rather than use in-game generated images -- perhaps there were legal and copyright issues -- everything is rendered by the same artist, in a somewhat similar (and not overly accomplished) style. For Gabiel Knight's New Orleans, they work well enough, but for most others they don't provide a good feel of what the game is really like. Which is a shame, because the book itself is well-made. A solid-hardback with full color pages throughout.

Such a great concept, but a miss on execution.

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The Light Ages poses as something of a rehabilitation of medieval science. The book follows the career and environment of English monk John Westwyk, author of The Equatorie of the Planetis, a work in English describing the astronomical instrument of his invention, a modification of the astrolabe. So there's a lot of timekeeping, sacred calendars, astrology and models of planetary motion. While interesting (I now have a much better idea of how to use an astrolabe, and why it has the shape it does with that off center circle) there's precious little science to get excited about [and why should there be, since there really wasn't such a thing as science yet]. Some of the history is very interesting on its own, such as the fact that Westwyk joined the unsuccessful Despenser's Crusade against the antipope. Here's a few tidbits from my Kindle notes:

Why the days of the week are ordered as they are:
And the date of the Great Flood:

The Things That Are Not There, by CJ Henderson is hard-boiled private eye mashed with the Cthulhu Mythos. This is I guess the first of a series and ultimately this first story brings together a Doc Savage like crew of improbable people to fight the mythos. Not my cup of tea. More interesting was trying to figure out when it was set/written. It seemed contemporary, but there were no cell phones. Check pub date: 2006. Hmmm.... maybe it's set historical, but it doesn't read like something that's being set in a different time. And then Oriental is used to describe something that's not a rug. A deeper dive shows that it was first published in 1992 under a pen-name. Even that date is pushing it for unpreferred nomenclature.

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The Book of Merlyn by TH White was originally a fifth book of The Once & Future King. On the whole, I think the publishers were right to 'exclude' it, though some of the best parts were inserted into the earlier parts of the book. It is a bit too polemical as an antiwar manifesto, as perhaps could only be the case when the pacifist White was facing WWII.

Pray for Thomas Mallory, Knight, and his humble disciple, who now voluntarily lays aside his books to fight for his kind.

The story, such as it is, is Arthur on the eve of The Battle of Camlann with Mordred, is reunited with Merlyn and some of his other animal tutors, who rag mercilessly on the human race for being horrible warlike monsters. The episodes of Arthur with the ants and the geese are here, and they fit somewhat better philosophically in this argument about warfare and nature, but are much better put into the Sword in the Stone, which I guess White did in later editions when it was clear 'Merlyn' was not going to be published at all.

The version I have is apparently the first publication of it in this form, published by the University of Texas from the TH White papers kept there. The introductory essays are also illuminating, particularly about White's sadistic streak that brings to mind Agravaine. Also, for an academic press, the illustrations by Trevor Stubley are surprising and excellent.

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On the Map, by Simon Garfield

An enjoyable romp through mapmaking from the very beginnings to Google Earth and Skyrim. Lots of entertaining details.

 You Look Like A Thing And I Love You, by Janelle Shane

The book seems to be a reworking of material Shane has shared in her AI weirdness blog. On the one hand, it shows, on the other hand, it makes for light entertaining reading.

I was a little disappointed that the scope of the book focuses on various flavors of machine learning AI (as opposed to symbolic or strong AI). Of course, the latter is a super hard problem, but it's of infinitely more interest.

But the book does reinforce the idea that machine learning AI is terrible and terrifying. If you set it the task of winning at chess and other games, it does an amazing job, because it's easy to 'reward' the program with victory or points. But when the goal is to teach an AI to, for example, act as a customer service agent, or identify what's in a picture, or drive a car down the street, it's harder to train them when the victory condition is 'act like a human would act'.

So the book is a compilation of more or less hilarious and horrifying failures of AI. The basic idea is to train your AI to absorb training data and make a bajillion connections so that it can spit out more of the same. The problem seems to be that we're bad at setting tasks, bad at giving clean data, and bad at making the original judgments the AI is trying to emulate. One of the common examples is text generating AIs, where you train your AI on recipes or Harry Potter novels and let it make up its own once it gets the hang of it. Another common thing of the sort is the autocomplete or Google's help in finishing your search request, which is how "Why won't my parakeet eat my diarrhea?" became a thing. Once the AI randomly latched onto that as a cromulent phrase, people making google searches also latched onto it. That's some serious click bait there. And thus the problem. The Google AI takes those clicks as 'rewards' that it is very accurately predicting what people were going to ask.

But mostly they're just odd, like the motto hearts Shane recently posted:



Other examples look at trying to decipher what's in a picture. For training data, the AI used people-generated descriptions of pictures and then went number crunching away. Now ask yourself, honestly, how many times have you described a picture by saying, "It has zero giraffes in it." probably never. But if there were a giraffe in the picture, you'd probably be likely to mention it. So the AI has seen a few pictures that are described as containing giraffes, but it has never seen a picture described as having zero giraffes in it. The result is that the AI often declares that there are giraffes in pictures that do not contain giraffes.

This kind of bias in the sample has real-world consequences as well. An AI trained to make hiring or loan application decisions turns out to be very good at modelling the human-generated data and discriminating against the same kind of people the employers and banks do. Since the AIs are rather opaque black boxes, it's hard to root out such bias, since we don't really know what the AI is paying attention to.

A related example from driving. The researchers thought they were teaching the AI to keep the car in the middle of the road, and not driving off the sides. Instead, they seems to have taught the AI to keep the green grass at fixed locations on either side of the field of view. When the car went onto an overpass, the green disappeared and the car was flummoxed.


Great, amusing read that shines a light on some important issues as inevitably medical and financial data gets churned through AIs like this.

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The Witchfinder's Sister, by Beth Underdown

I found this a disappointment. Matthew Hopkins was an English witch-finder who had a brief, but very nasty career. I was ready to get my hate on, but the Hopkins of this novel does not seem to much resemble the original. As the title suggests, the book follows Hopkins' [entirely fictional] sister Alice as she returns to join his household after she is widowed. There are dim family secrets that slowly get winkled out, but the action stays on Alice, so much of the witchfinding occurs offstage. It does provide a slow excruciating crescendo as our narrator gets ever more closely involved with the witchfinding and the deplorable details emerge.

But the motivations provided by the backstory conflict with what we know of the real Hopkins, and the author toys with witchcraft being real, which seems like a bizarre step. If people really can and do magically murder people, it's worth finding them out. The tragedy of the witchhunts is that it was all bullshit.

Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World by Suzy Hansen

Hansen moved to Turkey as a young journalist and immersed herself in the local politics and culture, and wound up learning a lot about the US and its involvement/meddling in foreign countries, and how the people of those countries subsequently view the US. I have a hard time assessing my feeling about the book. Some of it may be generational. For me Vietnam was history, but it certainly loomed large, and the 80s was all about US meddling in the Americas, and the aftermath of our previous meddling in Iran.

It's hard for me to not imagine our disastrous meddling in Iraq and Afghanistan not inspiring similar cynical feelings in millennials, but Hansen seems to have sprung from a more conservative family. Anyway, half of my reaction to the book is, "How could she ever have been so naïve?"

And then the second half of my reaction to the book is, "How can she be so credulous?" Just because she's getting information about the US from critics in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, Greece and elsewhere is hardly a guarantee of trustworthiness. So sometimes the kneejerk anti-Americanism rankled.

She's pretty down on Ataturk, deriding his modern day secularist Turkish followers as Western-style hedonist educated elites working towards some alien 'modernity' that is not-Turkish. I mean, that's probably accurate to a certain extent, but it's weird seeing her spend a fair amount of the book being something of an apologist for Erdogan and his Islamist tendencies, only to be suddenly shocked by them a bit further on.

I also have some doubts she understood some of the things she was hearing about. She spends some time on the problems in Greece.

Greeks aren't upset about doctors performing healthcare. The crucial piece there is 'side money'. One of the huge problems in Greece is tax evasion. Greece can't perform services for its citizens (or pay back loans to international banks) if people are hiding income under the table.

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 I heard he's doing great things these days, so I thought I'd pick up this biography.

It's a good one, but it helps to have great source material. I think the most surprising thing about the early chapters was how different slavery was from my conception. Though this is no doubt due to Douglass being in Maryland within throwing distance of the Mason Dixon line, rather than in the Deep South. Rather than working for years in the same field, he moved around quite a lot, both with the family that owned him, but also being 'rented out' to other families who needed labor. Later on, he learned a trade in caulking for shipbuilding and essentially lived on his own, paying for his own food and lodging, while sending the majority of his pay back to his owner.

Ultimately, of course, he escaped, becoming a major figure in the abolitionist movement, and renowned for his oratory. One of the great details is that one of the books he used to learn to read was a book of famous speeches, and he apparently absorbed it, cover to cover. Some of the ancient Roman speeches regarding slavery inspired his own abolitionist thinking.

While occasionally bogged down in petty rivalries within the abolitionist movement, Douglass also had a broad scope and was one of the many people involved in both abolition and women's suffrage. This was a two-way door and many (white) women were also supportive of abolition. This didn't always go down well, or be reported fairly:

"the tenth-anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society was moved after being barred from the Broadway Tabernacle), reporters took salacious note of what they chose to see as the 'semi-flirtations' in a meeting 'chiefly composed of members of the fair sex,' but attended as well by 'sable-complexioned sons of Africa'"
...
"On August 26, 1842, when [Abby] Kelley began her address to an antislavery convention in Rochester, in the Third Presbyterian Church, the minister was so appalled that a woman was speaking publicaly, and ordered the small gathering out of the building."

In 1860, after Lincoln's election, things were clearly pretty hot. This Winslow Homer print gives an idea of the brawl that occurred when a commemoration of John Brown was gatecrashed by members of the Constitutional Union Party. They were against secession, but not anti-slavery.

After the war, Douglass was far too optimistic about how ex-slaves and black people would just enter society. He seemed to think abolition and the vote would cure everything. I don't know that he had much experience of the Deep South, but that slowly dawned on him as lynching became common. Also, I think he may have underestimated his own genius and success. There is a whiff of that Bill Cosby tone of, if you all just got off your lazy butts, you'd be as successful as I am. I think he should have learned faster from the varied fortunes of his children, who with many advantages and riding his coattails, were always something of a disappointment to him.

Another poor choice was getting involved in the Freedman's Bank, which failed not long after he joined its board and lent his popularity to it. "Some scholars claim that the failure of the Freedman's Bank and the loss of their savings led to a distrust of all banking institutions for several generations among the black community."

Getting back to being out of touch. "Those with their eyes open to the oppression of black laborers in Mississippi and Louisiana in 1879 saw Douglass as simply wrong when he claimed that "the conditions … in the Southern States are steadily improving." His prediction "that the colored man there will ultimately realize the fullest measure of liberty and equality" was cold comfort in 1879."

His ambassadorship to Haiti was also somewhat mixed, although he seems to have done well when faced with some autocratic rulers and undiplomatic US military, who wanted a naval base there. Later he helped put on the Haitian pavilion at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Though there was kind of a shameful scene when the expo held a Colored People's Day and stocked up on watermelon. Many blacks boycotted it, but Douglass apparently took the opportunity to give a corker of a speech.

"The introductions over, Douglass rose once more, put on his glasses and began somberly reading a paper, "THe Race Problem in America." Suddenly he was interrupted by 'jeers and catcalls' from white men in the rear of the crowd. In the August heat, the old man tried to go on, but the mocking persisted; his hand shook. Painfully, Dunbar witnessed his idol's persecution; the great orator's voice 'faltered.' Then, to the young poet's surprise and delight, the old abolitionist threw his papers down, parked his glasses on them, and eyes flashing, pushed his hand through his great mane of white hair. Then he spoke: 'Full, rich and deep came the sonorous tones, compelling attention, drowning out the catcalls as an organ would a penny whistle.' 'Men talk of the Negro Problem,' Douglass roared. 'There is no Negro Problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.'"

 

I really like Sobel's book on Galileo's Daughter, so I was definitely curious to read this one. It tells the history of the female calculators at Harvard University. How their role changed from the late 19th century into the mid-20th. First as (very modestly paid) numerical calculators, and then examiners of photographic plates, and on into become some of the main organizers of early stellar spectroscopic data, and early studies of variable stars to the first Ph.D. students and dissertations, and on into everything from Oh Be A Fine Girl to spectroscopic binaries, to the discovery that stars are mostly hydrogen and helium, to the law between variable star periods and their intrinsic brightness, one of our first and best rulers for measuring the distance to distant stars.

Just some other details that caught my eye:

The story focuses on the women, but also goes into other activities of the broader Harvard Observatory, including setting up a telescope in Peru near Arequipa, which got involved in some civil unrest "[Bailey] recorded daily events, the din of nearby rifle fire, and his relief that the battle coincided with the cloudy season, 'as otherwise it would sadly interfere with our night work.'" Or Shapley's work on globular clusters showing that we are not in the center of the galaxy. In Shapley's words, "the solar system is off center and consequently man is too, which is a rather nice idea because it means that man is not such a big chicken."

Just after WWII, Cecilia Payne and her husband Sergei Gaposchkin took in the family of Reverend Casper Horikoshi -- a Japanese born missionary whose family had recently been interned at one Heart Mountain camp before now coming to Massachusetts for Divinity school. He and his wife probably had some stories of their own to tell.