Five Things: No Good Options, AI Thinking, Tetra Pak, Camouflage, Novel Finishing
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
One of the recurring discussions I am having with my wife is the big question about what is going on in the USA. My wife always asks the same question: “why isn’t anything happening?” - and when people take to the streets everywhere in the nation to celebrate No Kings Day, we felt such a relief. Something is indeed happening. It’s still not enough, but it is growing and we are getting helpful that the orange menace will be over before the MAGA croonies totally wreck the democracy and install their autocratic right-wing idiot regime.
It is so hard for me to process why people want to take away their and other people’s civil liberties, why people still believe that simple answers for complex issues will work and why people think that everything will change for the better once we identified those who are different as the culprit, as the enemy we have to get rid off. It is just sickening.
Enjoy these Five Things!
America Has No Good Options in Iran
It is becoming increasingly clear that the current U.S.-Israeli campaign of missile and drone strikes is not about to topple the entrenched regime. Nor will it entirely knock out Iran’s conventional capacities such that Tehran cannot interfere with passage through the Strait of Hormuz or threaten facilities vital to the global energy trade.The United States might now feel the urge to escalate, potentially using ground forces to seize Iranian facilities and territory or backing separatist forces around the country. But the risks of these forms of escalation far outweigh their possible gains. At this point, with the global economy jittering and the Middle East in convulsions, Washington’s best bet is not to further commit to a war it entered recklessly but to find a way out.
While I still think that fighting the islamic regime is the right thing to do, I am also appalled by how little strategy seems to be involved in this endeavour. Then again, I am not surprised that Trump didn’t think everything through.
Why Even Smart People Believe AI Is Really Thinking
Our cognitive biases developed to help us survive in complex social environments, say researchers. We have evolved to view linguistic fluency as a proxy for intelligence, and engagement and helpfulness as indicators of trustworthiness.
Builders of AI tools lean in to this deliberately. The humanlike qualities of chatbots are a calculated effort by designers and engineers to make AI more useful, but also more compelling and stickier—just like social media.
Oh, AI is not thinking. Surprise. And now people still have to understand the difference between deterministic and probabilistic systems to figure out why an AI rarely gives the same answer twice.
Tetra Pak: The Shape of Innovation
The story of Tetra Pak is in many ways a story of solving problems, and whenever a solution was found, a new problem often arose as a result of the solution itself. Throughout the late 1950s and into the 1960s, the company, now operating out of a new factory complex in Lund, had two existential problems.
The tetrahedron was clever and efficient in use of its material, and by 1960, there had been over one billion packages produced using the shape. In fact, its shape was so brilliant that the famous Danish physicist Niels Bohr called it “a perfect practical application of a mathematical problem” during a visit to Lund. But (depending on how philosophical you want to get), real life is not a theoretical mathematical problem, and the original Tetra Pak came with some inherent flaws.
I honestly don’t know how I came across this article, but I learned a lot about the ubiquitous Tetra Pak.
How American Camouflage Conquered the World
In 2001, Crye Precision (then known as Crye Associates) got its first military assignment: to make a prototype of a new kind of helmet. While the company was making it, 9/11 happened. With the announcement of the so-called War on Terror, Crye Precision took on a new challenge: camouflage. In all their exploratory research conversations with soldiers, Crye and Thompson learned that the US camouflage situation didn’t work. Soldiers were frequently wearing mismatched camo, which made them stand out on the battlefield as opposed to blending in.
I love camouflage. I still remember the pair of camouflage pants my mom sew for me when I was 8 or so, which I loved to wear when I played in the woods. I really have to get some camouflage pants again.
Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?
Finishing the book should be straightforward enough. The writer has gone to the trouble of arranging the words one after the other. My task is to follow: start with the first and go in order until I have reached the last. How hard can that be? Very hard, it turns out, if you are a nonfinisher like me.
Every word I read comes with a built-in off-ramp. At the first hint of trouble—say a description stretches a bit long—I stop to remind myself of the virtues of patience. At the second hint, fretfulness takes hold, and I count the pages to the next chapter break. I jump to the book’s end and discover that the last page is, still, 378. Every nonfinisher knows what happens next. My eyes fall on the spines of the stack of unread books next to my bed, and I idly wonder: Had I not planned on reading one of those first?
I have this policy of not starting books with more than 200 pages as I find them too intimidating. And I still have that 10000 page book by Murakami laying on my night stool, which my best friends gave me, so I have to read it. But I am really got at putting books down if they do not catch my attention anymore.
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico