Month: October 2025

In New York City it can take a while to get to your flight by public transportation. In addition to the travel time itself, there is all the waiting around — first for the subway, then for the shuttle bus, then, after all that, even for the elevator at the airport.

Today I was on that elevator with another guy who was on his way to a flight, and he looked very grumpy. He turned to me and said “I can’t believe this takes so long.”

“Yes,” I said “that’s true.”

“But then,” I added, “the plane goes very fast.”

I think I managed to lift his mood.

The 2009 sci-fi action flick Surrogates posited a world where people send idealized physically fit robotic versions of themselves out into the world. Meanwhile, the actual people puppeteer their surrogates from the safety of their homes, while growing fat and lazy.

As I have been reading more and more research papers that have obviously been “cleaned up” by ChatGPT or one of its cousins, I am reminded of this film (based, by the way, on an excellent comic book series). Now in 2025, the thing that is being idealized is not one’s physical appearance, but how one expresses oneself.

We are entering an age when the words people use in public discourse are not their own. Rather the words you see them use are a kind of amalgam of all the words that have ever been used by everybody else, courtesy of Large Language Models.

It’s the intellectual equivalent of digital make-up. Except it is worse, because now it is not merely our physical form that is being painted over, but our very thoughts and ideas.

Will we eventually arrive at a reality in which verbal expression itself is systematically cleaned up and homogenized? Will every human utterance we hear eventually become a kind of intellectual autotune?

I worry that in this brave new world the unique poet’s voice will disappear, replaced by homogeneous A.I. slop. This would be tragic, because society needs that idiosyncratic spark of the individual human mind to keep it awake and healthy.

As Bob Dylan once said: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”

On this day of the year, in 1446, the Hongul alphabet was published. That alphabet, commissioned by King Sejong the Great of Korea, was arguably the single most influential act by a government to level the playing field for its nation.

The consequences were rapid, far reaching and quite permanent. The Hongul alphabet led quickly to near universal literacy and more.

Korea had been a highly stratified society, with the aristocracy and priesthood on the top and everyone else — the peasants — far below. But once everyone could read and write, a thriving middle class quickly formed.

Ordinary people could now form their own businesses, buy and sell property, participate in education and government, even sue their aristocratic countrymen in court. It was perhaps the most successful act of universal enfranchisement in history.

During our own sad time, when the executive branch of the U.S. is trying its darnedest to disenfranchise its citizenry — and terrorize us all in the process — it is good to remember a moment in history when a government actually did something good for ordinary people.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Illinois Governor JB Pritzker just received the highest honor that any American can receive in 2025. Specifically, the felon in the White House just said that they should both be thrown in jail.

In these perilous times, we need heroes. When an entire branch of your government has been highjacked by bumbling autocratic idiots, being trolled by the biggest idiot of them all is a badge of honor.

Johnson and Pritzker may have just been given the greatest gift that any American patriot can receive — they have been singled out as defenders of our Constitution by the Criminal in Chief himself. There can now be no doubt that they are both true American heroes.

We were having lunch today at Peacefood at 41 E 11th St (just East of University Place). It is one of the best eateries in NYC, and arguably one of the best eateries anywhere in the world.

Do yourself a favor and check it out. If you truly love yourself, you will order the Spicy Szechuan Wontons. You can thank me later.

We asked about the nachos. The waitress said that they were great, while noting that some consider the olives to be controversial.

Considering everything going on in the world right now, I was so happy to be in a place where the most controversial issue is adding olives to nachos. When the waitress came around later, I told her that.

She agreed wholeheartedly. I think she knew exactly what I meant.

Visions of the future often seem to go to one of two extremes. Either the future is a bleak and nightmarish dystopia (eg: Orwell’s 1984), or it is more of a utopia, better in many ways than our own reality (eg: the original Star Trek).

Of course even a utopia can have a dark underbelly. The seeming perfection of a future world, with all of its lovely techno-polish, can mask various sorts of deficiencies.

For example, a world that is perfectly devoid of crime might be the result of some extreme form of law enforcement. Similarly, a world without health problems might be the result of forced eugenics.

This kind of deceptive vision of a more perfect future might be termed a “futopia”. At first glance a futopia looks like a utopia, but that extra letter “f” signifies futility — the futility of trying to achieve perfection when dealing with something as messy and complicated as the human condition.

What do you do when the executive branch of your federal government is doing everything it can to manufacture the appearance of violence and chaos in your nation’s cities, just so that they can declare martial law and thereby avoid holding a midterm election?

Maybe you just have to hope that they are stupid enough to pick on an extremely peaceful city like Portland Oregon, so that everyone will understand that they have no idea what they are doing.

Sutton’s Law states that you should spend your resources focusing on the most likely solution, rather than spending time and money looking into every possibility. It comes out of an apocryphal story that the bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why by a reporter he robbed banks, and he replied “Because that’s where the money is.”

Interestingly, Sutton claims that the reporter made that story up, and that he never said any such thing. Which leads to an interesting question: How many well-known laws or principles are based on a story about something that actually never happened?

As Yogi Berra once said “I really didn’t say everything I said.” By the way, Berra really did say that.

Recently I was at a workshop in another country. Over dinner one of my colleagues, a scientist, told me that he had made the difficult decision not to attend an upcoming international conference in the U.S.

He was worried that the current political environment in America might be too unfriendly to researchers from other countries. His exact words were “I feel uncomfortable going to the U.S.”

“I know what you mean,” I replied. “Even I feel uncomfortable going to the U.S. I can only imagine how you feel.”

This past week the U.S. administration flew in all of the top U.S. military brass from where they were stationed around the world — most likely at great expense. And then proceeded to bore them with several hours of bizarre and rambling talks about nothing.

Somebody told me that the entire episode seemed very embarrassing and dysfunctional. I pointed out that there is always a silver lining, and that this farce has actually served a practical purpose.

The administration is actually doing our nation a favor by making sure the military knows that they are complete idiots. This will hopefully increase the chances that we can trust the military to act responsibly if these wiseguys attempt a coup.