On my way out, I picked up a 5G tablet computer. It’s running on Android, and one of the beauties is that I can really write with a “pen” on it. While many predecessors felt more like writing with a banana in the sand, this one is really (!) good. I also considered e-ink tablets like, for example, the …
During my last stay in Hong Kong, I met Elizabeth Briel, who is an American visual artist, operating in Hong Kong and Athens. We usually take the chance to catch up when I am in Hong Kong, and Elizabeth is always working on interesting projects with a technological twist. This time, she introduced me to a silk thread from Kyoto which is plated with metals, including gold. The material has the properties of silk and gets a metal shine, which can range over a whole rainbow in colours, depending on the metals used. It is a hugely labour-intensive production process, which even includes the work of children, as they have the ability to do such fine work. The material is usually used for high en embroidery. We have seen no woven fabric yet. Talking to Chinese friends, caught their interest. Would it be possible to produce enough of the thread to weave a fabric that can be used in for example an extremely exclusive wedding dress?
Perhaps the answer to this question leads to Tilburg, a city in the Netherlands that once was the centre of a “European wool empire”, and then diversified rather creatively into other industries. But building on this heritage, there is a Textile Lab on the premises of the Tilburg Textile Museum. It is a fascinating place, which acts as a “development lab for makers” in textile. During a visit, I saw that in the lab, there are conductive yarns on the shelf. Would it be possible to produce a silk yarn and twill in a microscopically thin copper thread? Then use the conductivity to plate the silk with gold using electrolysis? What would that look like? And could such a process produce enough to put it on a loom? A few weeks later, I was able to meet Vera De Pont, who is working as a yarn specialist in the lab. Vera kindly met me in the museum library, and Elizabeth joined online to brainstorm on the possibilities of a future project. This was a first and very productive step. I guess, experimenting first with different twill structures and settings of electrolysis is a good way to start seeing what happens in practice. This sounds like occupying a good part of my summer break.
(Photo of the silk yarn by Elizabeth Briel 2021)
I admit I am a bit handicapped recovering from surgery. That makes me grumpy as a default setting. Looking through my recent emails, I was reminded to follow up on a potential application of GPT 2 to create an automatic email reply bot. In the ideal case, everybody would have one, in the near future, and while the bots are conversing in “Cyberspace”, we then could do more enlightened things. GPT 2 is an unsupervised AI system that is easy to access by APIs. It can transform, predict texts, as well as complete paragraphs. Among others, the access I am using is via https://deepai.org/machine-learning-model/text-generator.
For example, I entered for predictive purposes the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey:
“Tell me, Muse, of that man of many resources, who wandered far and wide, after sacking the holy citadel of Troy. Many the men whose cities he saw, whose ways he learned. Many the sorrows he suffered at sea, while trying to bring himself and his friends back alive. Yet despite his wishes he failed to save them, because of their own un-wisdom, foolishly eating the cattle of Helios, the Sun, so the god denied them their return. Tell us of these things, beginning where you will, Goddess, Daughter of Zeus.”
The result generated by the system sounds to me like any paragraph taken from a contemporary bachelor thesis in any social sciences subject. To be fair “AI” (Artificial Intelligence) is the wrong technical approach to write such a thesis (I mean the term “intelligence”). But anyway, have a look. Automating contemporary philosophers seems not far fetched; if you catch my drift:
“But he left many among the rest of Niflheim, to whom he asked them to trust, and to take back many of their treasures. Many found out of ignorance the reason why they should trust Zeus: "The word of Zeus is not known, and it is very strange for him who says that this day is the Lord of the Worlds." For I had come to hear his tale and see what it might mean. Then the gods took their place on the slopes at Helos above the mountain range, there a mighty mountain, an enormous and mighty serpent, for we have heard it say of the god, whose name was Zeus, or Zeus the son of Ophiodorus, or Ochos, like the great mountain of the sea and its vast mountains. And they went up from the mountains and over the place that went up: and they said, we are a god of earth”
As a practical result, I conclude, GPT 2 would neither work for my email response nor as Homer’s teaching assistant. This is the kind of text, that, when you think hard enough about it for some time, starts making sense. I guess that’s what people experience sometimes as “spiritual”. Good luck with that.
Of course, we were also laughing off automatic translations some years ago, and now they became quite good. So let’s wait a bit, what AI has to offer in the decade to come.
If you one day have some time at hand, where you can’t do much more than sitting upright in front of a computer, try this GPT-Python application described in the video below. Looks like fun.
(Thumbnail is public domain: Von Napoleon Vier, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1353019)
My Nokia phone broke down about a month ago, after great lifetime. So, I went to one of the many electronics shops in Hong Kong and opted to replace it with a HUAWEI P20 Pro. It has rather high specs and is marketed by having a co-designed camera with Leica. Quickly I figured that this phone is not a phone. It is more of a pocket computer with a quite good camera, which can also to phone calls. I always thought that taking photos with a phone is more of Lomographie than photography. But have a look yourself below: these photos are all unedited, like they came out.
Hong Kong Park on the morning run
Lock Cha Tea House, where I tend to hold my “office hours”
Hong Kong Park view
Chinese lanterns in Macau
Grand Lisboa Hotel in Macau
Pawn shops are the real center of power. If in a prime location, you just sit on this land with a building like this, then you don’t need the money of the developers.
Street in Macau, where I stayed.
Macau is full of sharks. Here one of them.
Macau Ferry Terminal upon arrival in Hong Kong
Lamma Island towards the South, seen from Mount Stenhouse.
The Bauhinia flower is the Hong Kong, city flower. It is also symbolic on Hong Kong’s map.
Fallen Bauhinia on the granite staircase up the Hong Kong Zoological Garden.
