Johnny Rodgers, my friend from Tumblr (among other things), joins us to discuss Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. We explore how Alexander's design philosophy has endured and influenced not just physical infrastructure, but also the software and algorithms that increasingly encroach on our built environment.

Show notes:

• A Pattern Language on Wikipedia
• On Surfing and Reading Books from Manso (my olde Tumblr)
• View Source, Johnny's Tumblr
• Renaissance Philanthropy's Playbooks, inspired by A Pattern Language
• Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, a seminal software engineering book heavily influenced by A Pattern Language
• Martha Stewart on Elio's

In May, we will be reading Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata and Marcel Duchamp and the Refusal of Work by Maurizio Lazzarato.

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

I had the pleasure of recording this on-site with George in his Bellingham workshop (a former tavern). I experimented with having Claude write shownotes for this episode, and it proposed this as a "key theme" of our discussion: "The parallels between Clarke's Overlords and modern artificial intelligence as agents of human transformation." This is a pretty remarkable guess given that I only told Claude that the episode was a conversation with George Dyson about Childhood's End. In any event, that is precisely what George and I talk about.

We also talk about many other things, including AI and social media as "overlord technologies," analog computing, ESP, and why he believes every company should employ an historian and a biologist.

Show notes:

• Buy George's new edition of Project Orion
• George's 2002 TED Talk about Project Orion
• Solar cigarette lighters
• Mina Rees, first female head of the mathematics department of the Office of Naval Research
• Tim O'Reilly: The End of Programming as We Know It

More show notes at techsontexts.net

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Keith Garrett, coy technologist, father, and former marine, comes on to discuss Ted Chiang's masterful "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling." We talk about the benefits of forgetfulness, the limits of attention, the difficulty of assessing the benfits of cognitively affecting technologies, biases, colonialism, religion, and traffic.

Show notes:

• Read "The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling"! Online or buy Exhalation wherever you buy books.
• Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers
• Toward Parsimony in Bias Research: A Proposed Common Framework of Belief-Consistent Information Processing for a Set of Biases
• The Internet’s Final Frontier: Remote Amazon Tribes
• Socratese's story of Egyptian king Thamus and the invention of writing
• Ted Chiang on the dangers of runaway AI relative to the dangers of no-holds-barred capitalism: Silicon Valley Is Turning Into Its Own Worst Fear

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Gina Trapani, exemplary human and champion of good things on the web, comes on to talk about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. We talk about creating universes, friendship, parenthood, all kidns of relationships, play, vulnerability, loving the web, the beauty of being bad at doing things, blank white boards, and learning a lot. If you listen, you will know what so many others already do: Gina is the best.

Notes!

• Van Halen logo in MS Paint
• Ira Glass on he taste gap
• Podcast with Nina Jacobson, producer of The Life Aquatic
• Tig Notaro on why nothing matters and that's a good thing
• Always remember no one cares.
• The Vampire Problem: A Brilliant Thought Experiment Illustrating the Paradox of Transformative Experience
• Cargo cults in post-World War II Melanesia

Also, Enough! is a great new album by Secret School (who did Techs on Texts's intro music): Bandcamp, Apple Music, Spotify.

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Nathaniel Raymond, Executive Director of the Humanitarian Research Lab at the Yale School of Public Health, joins me to talk about Francis Ford Coppola's masterful 1974 film, The Conversation. Nathaniel makes a compelling argument that the movie was a history of the future – with Coppola accurately documenting the profound shift that surveillance technology would have on individuals and society. As Nathaniel says in our discussion: the movie is somehow more relevant to society today, 50 years after it was made.

Many thanks to Natty for coming and doing this with me. He was the absolute best person I could have on to discuss The Conversation.

Notes!

• "New ways of seeing create new ways of being blind" - Interview with Nathaniel about monitoring atrocities in Sudan
• The Conversation (1974) Behind the Scenes with Francis Ford Coppola
• Treasures from the Yale Film Archive: The Conversation
• Noli Tangere Cordis, do not touch the heart: a story of medical progress and shifting ethics
• The historic Blue Baby operation
• The revelation of MKUltra in 1973
• The Satellite Sentinel Project
• Recap of the discussion of Internet Power talk at Yale
• The Conversation final scene

Listen next month for a discussion with Gina Trapani about Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Mark Coatney, long-suffering digital media pioneer (Time! Newsweek! Tumblr! Al Jazeera!), gets me to finally read a novel by Ursula K. Le Guin and I loved it. Topics include our changing world, what the world is for, preindustrial longing, why we should maybe recognize that media companies are ephemeral things, the pitfalls of power, lame AI, floating orbs of light, humans imitating machines, why humans like things, leaky boats as a metaphor for a lot of software, and the fact that any human power can be changed by human beings – including, possibly, the power contained within ourselves.

Many thanks to Mark for coming out to record with me at Yale. Huge treat to get some time with him in real life.

Tons of shownotes!

• The passage from Analogia by George Dyson that I refer to: "The Apache was a hard foe to subdue," according to John Gregory Bourke, "not because he was full of wiles and tricks and experienced in all that pertains to the art of war, but because he had so few artificial wants and depended almost absolutely on what his great mother – Nature – stood ready to supply. Our government had never been able to starve any of them until it had them placed on a reservation."
• Tales of the Tyrant, the story about Saddam Hussein mentioned by Mark.
• Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
• Social media and the Arab Spring
• Facebook's Oversight Board
• Biz Stone's tweet revealing the weight of having to deal with Twitter accidentally becoming a non-state actor
• Planetary Boundaries
• Le Guin's acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation Medal, which includes this phenomenal passage: "We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words."
• Simon Willison on NotebookLM's AI podcast generator
• Mark's (is it really Mark's?) NotebookLM-generated podcast about Ted Chiang's "The Great Silence"
• "Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art" by Ted Chiang
• Literally Unbelievable
• Domi & JD Beck covering "Flim" by Aphex Twin
• "Girl/Boy Song" by Aphex Twin
• How Russell Holzman teaches himself how to play breakbeats live
• Day Million
• Tracking bird populations with radar data
• The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Esther Dyson, whose bio defies summarization (and who happens to be sister of previous guest George Dyson), discusses Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and Spike Jonze's Her. We discuss the substance of life, bioethics, why our senses aren't always reliable, institutions and culture, predatory business models, child labor, mortality, building communities, and gardening versus carpentry.

A few notes and links related to conversation:

• Wellville, the nonprofit Esther founded to to achieve long-term, equitable, community wellbeing
• Two-phase commit protocol
• Google AI search tells users to glue pizza and eat rocks
• The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik
• Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and Compromise in Putin's Russia by Joshua Yaffa
• Exit, Voice, and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman
• The Order of Time by Carlo Rivelli
• Steve Jobs's 2005 commencement address at Stanford

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

Jordan Tigani, duck herder and renowned "database person," gives us the gift of "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Luis Borges. We talk about about the potential of language, the limits of language, compression, sloppy ontologies, LLMs, what thing the universe is, simulated annealing, our vague comprehension of what embeddings are, and why it's unfortunate that there's no way to not sound pretentious when talking about Borges.

A few notes and links related to the conversation:

• Read "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins". It's quick!
• The Wikipedia article about the essay is pretty good.
• Jordan is also a very talented writer about data and technology, which is great because he's better informed than almost anyone on the planet. Read Big Data is Dead from the MotherDuck blog.
• Simulated annealing on Wikipedia 🤯
• Trie
• Huffman coding
• Linnaean taxonomy
• Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller
• The Importance of Common Data Schemas and Identifiers from the Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum blog (written by Chris Holmes and me)
• Brad DeLong finds that ChatGPT doesn't know what ISBN numbers are
• Edgar Codd, proto database person
• WorldCat gets scraped (Hacker News discussion)

I asked ChatGPT to write a limerick about Borges and I wish I didn't have to admit that it's pretty good:

🍀🇦🇷🍀

There once was a poet named Borges,
Whose stories were full of deep forges,
In labyrinths vast,
Where time could not last,
And mirrors reflected strange Georges.

🍀🇦🇷🍀

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Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

• Buy Night Flight
• Buy The Little Prince
• Listen to Minds Behind Maps
• Look at the glorious website for GDAL (the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library). It's perfect!
• "The Little Prince becomes world's most translated book, excluding religious works"
• The post on LinkedIn where I asked for people to recommend fiction books.

Next month's reading is "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" by Jorge Luis Borges. Read it! It's short!

If you enjoyed this, please share it.

Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.

A few notes and links:

• Buy Jorge Luis Borges's Collected Fictions
• "The Zahir" PDF
• "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" PDF (Note that this is a different translation than those in the Collected Fictions that I've recommended)
• The counterfeit Zahir (Reddit discussion)
• Idealism on Wikipedia

If you enjoyed this, please share it.

Produced by Jed Sundwall. Write to jed at techsontexts.net with feedback and suggestions for books or guests.

Intro music by Secret School.

Outro music is "3/10th of the Population" by WE™.

Please donate to Radiant Earth.