It has come to my attention that some instructions I posted about four years ago are in need of revision. I appreciate the attention given to this post by the authors, and I wouldn’t even want to notice that the dead link they identified was moved by the same organization that one of them works for, because what kind of precedent does that set?
In all seriousness, I am sure that the container models that Hathi now provides are more reliable ways of performing these kinds of tasks. I look forward to doing more of them myself in the coming days that are ahead. I am very familiar with bitrot-related issues, which prevented me from even updating this blog yesterday when I intended to for nostalgic reasons. How-tos are very difficult to future-proof.
Like many netizens, I was amused by Andrej Karpahty’s “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks” when it first appeared. I don’t mean the explanation of what a recurrent neural network is or the claim that there’s much wisdom in Paul Graham’s essays. The text-generation samples, however, were really neat. RNN text-generators power many bots on the social media platform known as “twitter,” and I suspect that they may also be used in commercial solicitations. They’ve stimulated a lot of commerce and experiment, in other words. What more can you ask of software? Computer scientists put them to work almost immediately, as is natural, at generating computer science papers. Karpathy’s post has a few examples, and there are many others.
I had not watched many Adam Curtis documentaries until the last week or so. I’m a bit impressionable, and I may have read a metafilter comment ten years ago that described him as more of a conspiracy theorist than he actually is. To make up for that deficit in understanding, I’ve watched many of the documentaries over the last week. His subjects align with my research interests in a number of ways. He’s quite interested in game theory, public choice, and other quantitative methods of modeling human behavior and draws broader connections between these theories and political events than many scholars do. The Mayfair Set was a particularly fascinating exploration of the intersections between British mercenary groups derived from the SAS and the rise of finance capitalism. The connections are not always given in enough detail to satisfy a scholar in a textual argument, but documentaries do not have this requirement.
When I wrote my last post about modeling Darko Suvin’s genres of Victorian science fiction, I did not have access to Suvin’s comprehensive bibliography. What can I say? The Louisiana State Library loaned me theirs, but it took a few days. I was forced to model the texts that Suvin claimed were not science fiction. While I could guess what many of the books that Suvin would admit to the Victorian SF canon were, I preferred to wait until I could see them in cold print before gathering them.
We are currently living in the era of John le Carré, if the attention given to the recent biography, memoir, and the television adaptation of his 1993 novel, The Night Manager, is any indication. I’m a long-time le Carré watcher. No adaptation will beat Thomas Alfredson’s film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as far as I’m concerned, especially not for capturing the weirdness of his plots and characterizations. Ian Buruma’s article covers the familiar (to le Carré scholars) territory of the image of the father in his various fiction. Buruma begins the piece by noting the resemblance of Richard Roper, the villain from The Night Manager, to Alan Clark.
The Object Lessons series, edited by Christopher Schaberg and Ian Bogost, comprises small, attractive books on everyday things like dust and silence. I suppose that such movements as “object-oriented philosophy,” “thing theory,” and “no ideas but in things” lurk somewhere in the motivating background. But it’s a pragmatic, exploratory series as far as I can tell from reading one volume: Evan Kindley’s Questionnaire. I should go ahead and disclose that my pitches on the following objects were summarily rejected:
I admit to certain vices. I’ve been on the internet for a very long time. I read science fiction, and not just for my academic work. I was reading usenet in the early 90s, often using a VAX cluster. So many of the stupendous concepts of 2016, ranging from “meme magic” to transhumanism, I’ve seen develop in slow-motion: one shitpost at a time. Probably the purest manifestation of cyberlibertarianism, however, is cryptocurrency. I see little reason to separate political libertarianism from the hard right; anyone with doubts about this should read Murray Rothbard or the egregious Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Softer versions of libertarianism that emphasize legal pot at market prices are loss leaders at best. In The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism, David Golumbia argues that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies arose from ideas about currency associated with the conspiratorial (and libertarian) right.
Like many habitual internet users, I strongly believe that I have never bought anything advertised to me on the web, nor have any of these ads affected my behavior beyond momentary irritation. I sometimes take ad-blocking steps and am well aware of cookies, browser-entropy measures, and the wily IP address. My disdain for the so-called “Flash” plugin is complete. What, then, could a book primarily focused on the marketing models used by data scientists to target consumer behavior on the web tell me? Nothing that I didn’t already know, right?
Michael Clune and I have several things in common: we’re about the same age (I’m a bit older), we’re both English professors, and we played many computer games during our youth, adolescence, graduate education, and perhaps even now. Gamelife: A Memoir is not so much about the games themselves but rather their formative effect on the author. Though I also spent many hours playing The Bard’s Tale II, Suspended, and few other games cognate to the ones Clune writes about (Ultima IV instead of III, Doom instead of Castle Wolfenstein, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri instead of Pirates!), they did not affect my lifeworld to the same extent. I once spent an entire seventh-period science class scribbling possible solutions to the time-travel puzzle in Sorcerer, a text adventure from Infocom like Suspended, and I was accused of taking notes to study at home by a classmate who regarded such activity as fundamentally corrupt. I was very proud of not needing to study or do homework at this point in life and indignantly defended my honor. Since I was the only person in class who owned these games, their very reality was questioned. (I did not solve that puzzle by the way. I turned in shame and despair to Invisiclues, and not for the first time.)