Happy Birthday 77

With brief musings on AI and the blog

Richard Lipton has turned 77 today. He and Kathryn are back in Manhattan after spending much of the summer in Harbor Springs, Michigan. The original for the photo at right was taken from the local newspaper there.

Today I am delighted to wish Dick a happy birthday and riff a little on “artificial existentialism.”

I thought for a moment that I had invented that term, but there is a 28-page book of poetry with that name, a web comic, and a reference in an article on Medium that channels Siri.

What I mean was prompted by the above “photo.” Is it a photo? I used the free-trial website palette.fm to colorize it from the following source:

Harbor Light News source

I am not sure that is “the” photo, either, as it was probably grayscaled for print publication, and what I found on the Web may have been a scan of a physical copy. The website has over a dozen filters to try, some of which introduce garish blues and violets and magentas. By choosing the filter named “Lavender Dusk,” I imposed a sunset on the image.

The website’s AI software also tells you what it finds in the photo. For “Lavender Dusk,” it finds:

“A pic of graves, latticework, gate, professor, door, campus, men, and rabbi.”

“Professor” is spot-on, and other words including “rabbi” are not far off, but we’d like to know where all the “men” and their “graves” are. Maybe this kind of AI needs to hallucinate in order to be effective.

Not-Posts

The birthday is also a time to take stock of the blog. We are nearing 1,100 posts. If you count the blog’s six fixed “Pages” (listed above to the right of “Home”) as posts, then this is post 1,099.

We thought we would hit 1,100 with this post, but the post we started drafting last month and finished last weekend became a Not-Post. That is, we wrote and then un-wrote a post. We have three friends to thank for that—and we will—but not right now. It may become a different post, but that post does not yet exist. The post that exists as of now is a not-post.

It is not the only not-post. This is, by the way, a completely different concept from that of a not-yet-post. The latter could be taken two ways:

• It could mean posts we’ve written but aren’t posting yet—they are saved up to fill in when needed. We’ve almost never had those. We didn’t have them to use during last fall’s long hiatus for reasons told here. (En-passant, we note that last year’s big chess cheating case and lawsuit seem to have been finally resolved last week.)

• It could mean posts we intend to do but haven’t written yet. We have a a lot of those. We have some prize recipients still to congratulate, memorials in mind, and topics like muons and MCSP that we’d like to revisit.

The latter would never count in a current count of posts; the former could if we had them. A thornier question is whether the latter kind would possess a zombie half-existence if we had ChatGPT do a first draft of them in the manner of this oeufvre. Come to think of it, perhaps that April 1 post—all of it written by ChatGPT—shouldn’t count as a post, which would knock us down to 1,098.

In any event, neither kind of post exists the way a not-post exists. Not-posts take a lot of time and multiple drafts. If we counted not-posts, we’d have rounded the 1,100 mark and be on the way to 1,200 by now.

Open Problems

A common saying on a birthday is, “Many Happy Returns.” Well, the number of times the Return key is hit is a measure of the amount of work on a post. Anyway, I’m sure you readers will join me in wishing Dick many more.

For two quick problems, are “oeufvre” and “77”-without-“th” typos?

[some word changes]