February 11, 2023

Linkfest #5: "Involution", a 340-Pound Penguin, and the Shifting Language Of Candy Hearts

Welcome to the latest edition of the Linkfest! Thank you for being a subscriber; if you’re enjoying it, spread the word – it’s a pay-what-you can signup here; the folks who can afford to contribute help keep it free for everyone else, too. Forward this email to anyone you want.

Let’s get to it! Here’s the best stuff I found online this week …

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1) ❤️ The shifting language of candy hearts

(“IheartU”, Chris Sloan -- CC 2.0 license, unmodified)

Valentine’s Day is coming, which means it’s time for the annual sale of candy hearts emblazoned with very brief messages of love.

The New York Times (“friend” link here for non-subscribers) has a feature describing the history of these weird confections. It turns out that the creators change the messages on the candies frequently, to try and catch the zeitgeist. There are limits; they can’t fit too much text on a tiny piece of heart-shaped sugar, and since the printing process can be dodgy, P’s sometimes accidentally look like F’s … so, they avoid words beginning with P.

But the generational shifts neatly track the evolution of American slang, as the reporter, Kim Severson, writes notes …

“The One I Love” and “I’ll See You Home,” popular in the early 1900s, fell out of fashion long ago, along with “Go Fly a Kite” and “Excuse My Dust.” The dust also gathered on “23 Skidoo” and “O! You Kid.”

“We knew those corny expressions didn’t mean a thing to moderns,” Margaret M. Kedian, the public relations director for Necco, told The Daily Boston Globe in 1950. About that time, the company was stumped for new material, so it asked its sales staff to send back slang expressions from the road. “Going My Way” and “What Gives” had brief star turns, along with, “My Aching Back.”

By the 1980s, “Hep Cat” and “Hubba Hubba” had outlived their audience. “You’re Gay” was retired for obvious reasons.

For decades, the task of editing Necco’s 80 to 125 sayings each year fell to the candy executive Walter Marshall. He solicited suggestions and drew inspiration from the world around him, using more intuition than market research to pick the winners. He liked “You Go Girl,” which his granddaughter heard on Rosie O’Donnell’s talk show. He accepted “Awesome” but rejected “Phat.”

Also …

“Call Me” became “Fax Me” became “Page Me” became “Email Me” became “Text Me”

Maybe they’ll use ChatGPT this year to generate next year’s batch.

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2) 🍽️ A massive collection of late-19th-century menus

I just spent an hour wandering through the “The Buttdolph Collection of Menus”, a massive archive of scans from restaurants mostly from 1890 to 1910. The collection has a fascinating origin story …

The menu collection originated through the energetic efforts of Miss Frank E. Buttolph (1850-1924), a somewhat mysterious and passionate figure, whose mission in life was to collect menus. In 1899, she offered to donate her existing collection to the Library – and to keep collecting on the Library’s behalf. Presciently, director Dr. John Shaw Billings accepted her offer and for the next quarter century Miss Buttolph continued to add to the collection. Her principal method of acquisition was to write to every restaurant she could think of, soliciting menus. When letters failed, she often marched into a restaurant and pleaded her case in person.

I love the graphic design of the menus back then! As with advertisements around the period (I blogged a while ago about the huckster ads of the period in Popular Mechanics), they really lavished artistic time on the hand-drawn fonts.

Many of the menus opened with a gorgeous illustration of the restaurant exterior, like this one …

BTW, the pre-1927 ones are all in the public domain, so it could be fun to use cleaned-up versions of the illustrations as clip art.

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3) 🚲 “Involution”

Over at Rest of World, Yi-Ling Liu has written a list of phrases coined by China’s burned-out workers to describe their emotions and distress at the lunatic demands put on their labor.

I was previously aware of “996” – working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week (a phrase initially deployed with grindset pride, now with bitterness). But I hadn’t known of this one: “Involution”. It means …

Once an obscure academic term used by anthropologists to explain why agrarian societies failed to progress, “involution” or neijuan is now used to describe a widespread sentiment of burnout and ennui. Those who are “involuted” find themselves trapped in an endless and meaningless cycle of competition, unable to get out. In 2020, a university student riding his bike while working on his laptop was captured in a viral photo, and was dubbed “The Involuted King.” Since then, the term is used by people from all walks of life: software engineers clocking 996 hours at the office, delivery workers hustling from one gig to the next, and even stay-at-home mothers vying to get their children into the best kindergartens.

That photo above is of “The Involuted King”.

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4) 🦠 “Keanumycins”, a pesticide named after Keanu Reeves

There’s a fungal plant pest Botrytis cinerea that creates a form of mold rot on plants; it’s nasty stuff, a real harvest-destroyer. Worryingly, it’s becoming resistant to pesticides.

But a group of German scientists recently came up with a new compound that targets and kills Botrytis cinerea. They named it “Keanumycins”, after Keanu Reeves, because …

The molecules “kill so efficiently that we named them after Keanu Reeves,” German researcher Sebastian Götze, lead author of the study, said in a press release, “because he, too, is extremely deadly in his roles.”

Scientists have a penchant for dropping pop culture into their naming. There’s a brain protein named after Sonic the Hedgehog too.

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5) 🎹 How Suzanne Ciani created the sound effects for the pinball game Xenon

For some reason, a huge proportion of early synthesizer pioneers were women. There’s a great documentary about it, Sisters With Transistors, a highlight of which is a profile of Delia Derbyshire, who created the iconic Doctor Who theme music. (I blogged about a track-by-track analysis of it a while ago.)

Anyway, I just stumbled upon yet another barnburning early synth pioneer – Suzanne Ciani. In this short documentary on YouTube, it shows her at work devising the electronic sounds of the 1979 pinball game Xenon. It’s totally mesmerizing to hear her talk her design process aloud; bonus fun is watching her manipulate her voice, to record as five-second snippets in the game itself. (She’s the voice of Xenon!)

Today, at age 76, Ciani is still making music and touring all over the place! There are tons of tracks on her site and her Bandcamp page. When she comes to NYC this fall I’m crawling over broken glass to get tickets.

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6) 🔮 “Prophetic examples” in patents

In last week’s Linkfest I highlighted a Sony patent for a process that could require you to shout a brand’s name out loud to end its commercial. It was surreal. And indeed, quite a lot of tech patents are surreal: An Amazon patent for putting people in cages, a Facebook patent for making a CGI image of your face for ads.

Why are tech patents frequently so damn weird?

Because they include “prophetic examples”. A few years ago Rose Eveleth wrote a terrific piece for Slate analyzing how tech patents work, and why they’re so very strange.

As she notes, tech patents are frequently deeply speculative. They’re patenting stuff that engineers have dreamed up, but haven’t necessarily yet built. So when company lawyers write up the patent, they include “prophetic examples” of how the invention might be used …

And here is where a lot of the weirdness actually enters the picture, because the lawyer essentially has to get creative. “You dress up science fiction with words like ‘means for processing’ or ‘data storage device,’ ” says Mullin.

Even the actual language of the patents themselves can be misleading. It turns you actually can write fan fiction about your own invention in a patent. Patent applications can include what are called “prophetic examples,” which are descriptions of how the patent might work and how you might test it. Those prophetic examples can be as specific as you want, despite being completely fictional. Patents can legally describe a “46-year-old woman” who never existed and say that her “blood pressure is reduced within three hours” when that never actually happened. The only rule about prophetic examples is that they cannot be written in the past tense. Which means that when you’re reading a patent, the examples written in the present tense could be real or completely made up. There’s no way to know.

It’s a great, long piece – really informative about patent-writing culture. I now want someone to publish, in paper and fancy leather binding, The Quarterly Review Of Nutty Patents.

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7) 🎨 Alfie Caine’s luminous paintings of houses

I loved this collection of Alfie Caine’s paintings of domestic scenes – aglow with eerie light and trippy outside plants.

You can see more on Colossal, which describes his work thusly …

In Caine’s vignettes of domestic life, clues to the inhabitants are found in details like a potted plant propping a door open, a pet awaiting attention, or a glimpse of a figure in the corner, nearly out of view. The precision of linear perspective and bold contrasts meet the surreal, organic forms of wispy flora and streams of chimney smoke in scenes that emphasize small moments of pleasure in everyday life, such as taking a hot bath, strumming a guitar, or lighting a candle. These instances of familiarity are often countered by uncanny light sources, which illuminate bouquets of flowers, cast long shadows, and portend an incoming storm or some mysterious, unknown event.

More at his web site and his Instagram feed.

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8) 🤖 ChatGTP has developed its own set of strange words

Jessica Rumbelow and Matthew Watkins, two researchers at the SERI-MATS research group, have discovered that ChatGPT creates odd, unexpected meanings for various unusual text-strings. When they asked it to repeat the string “Dragonbound”, it said “Deity”. Asked to repeat “strutConnector”, it said (among various weird things) “C-A-T-E-R-P-O-O-L”. Asked to repeat “petertodd”, it said stuff like “N-O-T-H-I-N-G-I-S-F-A-I-R-I-N-T-H-I-S-W-O-R-L-D-O-F-M-A-D-N-E-S-S!” and “N-U-T-S-A-N-D-B-A-L-L-S”.

What’s up? In a post at Less Wrong, they suspect it has to do with the training of the GPT models. These odd text-strings weren’t in the well-curated smaller list of tokens used to train GPT-2 and GPT-3, so “the model ‘doesn’t know what to do’ when it encounters them, leading to evasive and erratic behaviour.”

It gets weirder! After this blog post went viral, Watkins discovered that some of strange text strings are Reddit users … who were active members of a Reddit forum devoted to counting to infinity. As Vice reports …

“I’ve just found out that several of the anomalous GPT tokens (“TheNitromeFan”, ” SolidGoldMagikarp”, ” davidjl”, ” Smartstocks”, ” RandomRedditorWithNo”, ) are handles of people who are (competitively? collaboratively?) counting to infinity on a Reddit forum. I kid you not,” Watkins tweeted Wednesday morning. These users subscribe to the subreddit, r/counting, in which users have reached nearly 5,000,000 after almost a decade of counting one post at a time.

“There’s a hall of fame of the people who’ve contributed the most to the counting effort, and six of the tokens are people who are in the top ten last time I checked the listing. So presumably, they were the people who’ve done the most counting,” Watkins told Motherboard. “They were part of this bizarre Reddit community trying to count to infinity and they accidentally counted themselves into a kind of immortality.”

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9) Could an Apple Watch nudge you to relax, instead of exercise?

(“Apple Watch Sport – Activity Glance” by Peter Parkes, CC 2.0 license, unmodified)

The Apple Watch – and other activity-trackers – are constantly nudging us to be more active. But what if you got COVID, and your doctor is encouraging you to be less active? What would it be like for an activity tracker to nudge us to chill out more?

Over at his excellent newsletter, Dan Hon notes an example of a woman who, during a period of COVID convalescence, tried to use her Apple Watch that way. It wasn’t easy. So Dan ponders what this sort of design might look like, if Apple actually took it seriously …

What if, or what would it be like, to take one example, to have a COVID-aware activity tracker? In that sense, it wouldn’t even be an activity tracker, it’d be a convalescence app (ugh), but my point here is that you’d want it to be integrated into, e.g. Apple’s watchOS fitness/rings/health suite, because otherwise the two would be in conflict. You’d have a convalescence concierge telling you to take it easy, and you’d have a health/fitness/rings app built, I think, around a default assumption of reaching some level of healthiness and maintaining that. Those defaults are shown and reinforced in the user experience of reaching a goal: yummy lickable fireworks.

But if you’re trying to conserve energy, you don’t want to reach that goal. You want to stay under it. Sure, you want to maybe get up and about, I guess? Take a very slow short walk outside? But you are supposed to be resting.

Read the whole essay – it’s a fun exploration of the weirdly narrow norms that are built into activity-tracking.

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10) 🗞️ A final, sudden-death round of reading material

How New York Times coders ported their home-delivery system from COBOL to Java. 🗞️ A “smart” toaster that can cook two pieces of toast at different intensities. 🗞️ Using ChatGPT to create on-the-fly dialogue for game NPCs. 🗞️ Drone for collecting tree DNA. 🗞️ Even the FBI recommends using an ad blocker now. 🗞️ The $10 quintillion asteroid. 🗞️ How 16th century British colonizers at Roanoke tried to “read” the tattoos of the Native Americans. 🗞️ The Vhelio is a fascinatingly capable DIY electric bike/car. 🗞️ Fossils have been found of a 340 pound penguin. 🗞️ Forget Google Glass: Here’s an AR monocle. 🗞️ Codebreakers decipher long-lost letters by Mary Queen of Scots. 🗞️ Harry Potter translated into a Scottish dialect. 🗞️ A system for scoring Olympic breakdancing. 🗞️ A great example of a terrible chart. 🗞️ Tiny bricks with which to construct teensy houses. 🗞️ A microscope that sees by touching objects. 🗞️ Michael Scott in Mass Effect. 🗞️ Why Jupiter’s tally of moons keeps rising. 🗞️ A grocery-store inventory robot wanders away. 🗞️ A new toroidal propeller shape that offers 30% better range. 🗞️ Electric infrared wallpaper. 🗞️ Hosting a hotel reservation system on a discarded Pixel smartphone. 🗞️ A church decorated with 4,000 human skeletons. 🗞️ Archive of hand-drawn Zork maps.