socialising the early internet versus ai....

I'm trying to pin down the exact date but sometime in 1984, i was at a dinner party with a bunch of old university chums, and I went into a brief rant about how the Internet was coming and it would change everything. They all looked at me like I was some complete nutter (and they were perhaps not all wrong).

These college mates were from several walks of life (editor, travel guide publisher, film maker/producer, speech therapist) and quite well educated and not un-technical, but my enthusiasm was misplaced at that time

It took a long long time before they came to take for granted what I\d been using for 5 years - perhaps a decade and then some....and of course, another decade later, we started to see mobile, social etc, and some of the surveillance, toxic content, and other negative sides to things - but these were not well foreseen.

A lot later, like now, in 2024, i have calls from one of them about what new bad thing ai is going to do to the world. whilst AI research goes back to pre-internet days, and the AI "winter" itself dates from around 1984, the public awareness of generative AIs like ChatGPT is a little under 2 years old at the time of writing this. and already people have informed positions or views on what AI might do to jobs (esp. journalists and teachers, but also tech people). It is an interesting change of pace. and unlike the Internet, this hype cycle has come around with built in cautionary tales. 

Pangloss will be turning in his grave...

smelly media

Years ago, i remember we got asked at UCL (say 1994) would it be possible to carry a smell over HTTP - The question sounded intriguing (this was before a lot of spam) so we asked for more detail - turned out the sender was a very sensible person who traded fish from Scotland to England, and told us that many experts would check out the fish in the markets in Scotland by smell, to see how fresh they were - so he wonderd could you do this remotely-  of course, there was absolutely no reason why a MIME type, or an HTML markup or whatever couldn't be developed to carry smell, but the main challenges, we suggested, were the analysis at the sender side, and synthesis at the receiver side (analog to digital and vice versa, olfactory devices not being widely available) - of course ,there had been some (unfortunate ) movies in "Snifferama" (e.g. pink flamingos) but those relied on reproducing a single smell that had been pre-canned, as it were. A general solution entailing mass spectrometers and fancy miniaturised chemical factories might be feasible, but likely very expensive (though who knows, now, with 3D RNA printers and airport security tech, maybe more affordable).

So recently, I recalled reading as a kid about an idea for catching people who pee in swimming pools by adding a reagent to the water that reacted with urine to form an indelible dye that would stain their swimming trunks a bright color (a bit like those things they put in bags of money to deter people from stealing them due to being covered in same)...

And I thought of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and their nonsense on the Interweb, and wondered if we could not combine these ideas - if someone continues to emit excremental remarks on the net, social media could add a smell to all their future posts (or at least until they calmed down, or recanted.

Then everyone would know to take what they say with a pinch of salt, because it would be immediately obvious (with appropriate browser and phone/tablet pong-tech support) that there was something fishy about their remarks.

A true and fair history of the fair town of Paleochora

 the story starts with the founding of the town, and here we already get into murky territory - was it named after the venitian fort that some people claim was on the top of the escarpment/peninsula that sits between the two (sandy and rocky) beachfronts? i.e. Old Castle (paleo, chora) or was it just Old Town (chora means town in greek, after all)?

Recent research undertaken by my team has uncovered a much more interesting tale - the port was one of many used by the ancient kingdom of Mali (founded, as of course you know, by  Sundiata Keita ) - and was partof their route for trading safely (at arms length, a little like the small island in the port at Nagasaki used by the Japanese and Dutch) with the Europenas (typically marauding crusader types) - the name came from the Mandinka words for Poor (Pali) and Harp (Chora) - because the great Griot musicians from west africa looked down on the primitive music of Europe at that time 1226-1300 CE, or perhaps longer).

The griot poets tell that eventually the Mali trade ceased in this direction for lack of any goods coming their way, and they switched over most of their energies to consolidating the peace with neighbours in Songhay.

For several centuries, the town reverted to fishing (of course for a while, flourishing as a source of sea urchins), and was largely ignored by the Ottomans, and even when Greece regained independence (although Crete often threatened to cecede), the poor harpists of Paleochora just got on with their every day lives of fishing and olive groves.

Then somehow as part of the 20th century counterculture, Paleochora got itself on the map again, perhaps as an alternative to the increasingly rowdy events in Matala. Some of the long hairs wanted somewhere quiet to get away from the goat dancers and redneck omlettes and this was just the place. It also had less damp caves.

And thenceforward, a slew of campsites and tavernas and clubs sprang up, mainly along the pebbly beach - favoured by followers of Demosthenes), some were started by carpenters wives, some (poseiden - actually a misnomer and real origin was in "possession is nine tenths of the law" but they liked the version which was nine tenths of the sea - an iceberg of a story if ever I heard one).

A fun fact back hen was that some kids dressed up one of the local miniature crocodiles with wings and disguised its jaws as a beak, and pretended to all the stoners that this was a pelican - a larger harmless prank, which didn't lead to anything other than people throwing fish to the poor croc which preferred to live on Coipu - sadly, the native cretan coipu is now extinct, and so are the now never to be classified miniature crocs,  

For a while, the local arts thrived (although tiny paintings that adorned many of the taverna's wine glasses rarely survived a friday night, and in the end, most the artists moved to Gavdos where wanton destruction of dinnerware was less rampant). As part of this, the open air Sinema (for some reason, suprisingly not Kinema) showed a diet of classic movies such as Ποτέ την Κυριακή, A bout de soufle, and Giulietta degli spiriti, until eventually the land became too valuable and the screen and seating area were moved underground. For a while you could see Cocteau's Orphée, Derek Jarman's T empest, and all nighters of the Matrix and Blade series. Sadly, the entrance to the venue has become lost over time, although it is said that on the night of a red moon, you will here the voice of Elizabeth Walsh, or sometimes even Irene Papas, drifting across the Tamarisks. 

Nowadays, people prefer to chill in the Jetée, once known as Zagos (opposite Zygos - renamed aft the incident when a jesuit priest was thrown to the air and landed safely on the volleyball net the other side of the bar. The cyclist should have zigged instead of zagged. 

The only real controversy in town at the moment is the proposal to re-open the airport (the "fort" was actually Daedalus II, used by the sage in his test flights from Phaistos apparently before the disaster with the Icarus 737 max. 

Its been a long strange trip indeed.