Category: Language
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Situational metaphors, satire and sense-making
I was idly perusing Bluesky on 13 August when I read this exchange: “This evening, a fire truck was coming from the opposite direction, sirens blaring, lights blazing. There was an obstinate car that refused to make way. I later realized it was a Waymo driverless car. It didn’t know better. I hope that clueless…
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Vibes: From new age to new algorithms
The other day I was talking with a friend and moaning about writer’s block. My friend said: “You are into words and metaphors and stuff. What’s one small language puzzle that’s been nagging at you lately?” I blurted out: ‘vibes’. My friend replied: “Write about that then”. Lots of people have written about that word…
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Superintelligence: From the divine to the digital and back again
The word ‘superintelligence’ has been bandied about a bit recently, most prominently by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who said in a blog post on 23 September, 2024: “This may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a…
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Large language models, meaning and maths
I was reading an article in The Guardian about two novels by Benjamin Labatut. One novel, published in 2020, is entitled When We Cease to Understand the World and deals with quantum mechanics and war. The second novel The Maniac, published in 2023 and just out in paperback, is about John von Neumann, which brings…
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Vaccine hesitancy in Europe: A conceptual exploration
Many things changed rather fast when the Covid-19 pandemic spread around the world at the beginning of 2020. There were new social phenomena, like ‘social distancing’, a so-called non-pharmaceutical intervention intended to stop the spread of the coronavirus. There were new scientific and bodily phenomena, like quickly developed vaccines, so-called pharmaceutical interventions intended to stop…
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Truth, post-truth, and post-fake
I was sitting at my desk trying to think about something I could blog about. For some reason the word ‘truth’ popped into my head. After that I engaged in a bit of ‘reading the tea leaves’. That is, I messed about on the news database Nexis, rummaged in the Oxford English Dictionary and looked…
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Climate change, metaphors and me
We were sitting round the kitchen table chatting after Christmas, reminiscing about last Christmas. I nostalgically said that last year such conversations had sparked my interest in AI in the form of ChatGPT and given me ideas for blogging. I wondered what I should blog about now. We all agreed that there was always climate…
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Evelyn Fox Keller (1936-2023)
On 22 September 2023 Evelyn Fox Keller sadly passed away at the age of 87. She had been a theoretical physicist, a mathematical biologist, a feminist philosopher, a historian of science, and an inspiration to many across these fields. She integrated insights from all these fields creatively and critically, and, most importantly, she added some…
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From Omicron to Omega: What’s in a name?
The last few years have been years of planetary upheaval. We have all lived through a Covid-19 pandemic and are, in fact, still living with it, and we have all felt the effects of climate change. To deal with these planetary events, we had to invent and learn new concepts and new names. Quite recently,…
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Mitochondrial replacement and the pangenome
Recently two events caught my attention, which should at least be noted on this blog: the publication of the first human pangenome on 10 May 2023 and the birth of babies through a new human fertilisation technique variously known as mitochondrial donation, mitochondrial transfer, mitochondrial transplant or mitochondrial replacement on 12 May. I’ll say a…
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