Status:

Got out of the house this afternoon for a “walk” on my scooter with Fi and great-neph M. M called it my ATV which caused some snorts and it’s definitely not all terrain. Maybe one terrain, two at most, as long as there are no steep hills. But we did go off-road through the woodland next to the river, the path being reasonably traversable thanks to the lack of rain, and it was very nice to see all the trees and stuff.

Later I sorted out our recycling for Fi to take to the tip tomorrow. Being Birmingham residents our general rubbish is being collected but we haven’t had a recycling refuse collection in over a year now. We don’t produce that much waste, being a child-free couple on a budget, so it’s not been a problem like it has for some people we know, but after a couple of months our wheelie bin doth begin to overfloweth.

It doesn’t need to be sorted into paper, metal, plastic and glass, but I like to do it. One of my favourite random jobs in my 30s was working on the bins and I’ve had a long-standing fascination with how societies deal with their detritus and respect for those who do it. Going through the contents of our bin also felt like an accounting of our consumption, which feels like a good thing to be aware of.

Reading:

• Software brains & statistical engines — ‌Patel basically proposes a version of Alfred Korzybski’s “the map is not the territory,” that “the word is not the thing.” The database is always a simplification of the territory it models, and at some point every database stops matching reality. His insight was that we routinely confuse our representations of things with the things themselves and act on the map as though it were the world. Software brain takes this confusion as its operating premise: when the map and the territory diverge, the response is to change the territory, not the map. Asking people to make themselves legible to AI is that inversion turned into a business model. — Making yourself legible to system outside of your control that don’t have your best interests at heart strikes me as the main reason we send kids to school.
• The disappearance of the public bench — Delightfully long and comprehensive article about public seating infrastructure which I’m enjoying slowly reading. As someone who now can’t walk further than 100m without needing to sit down I have really come to appreciate the benches in my local park and note their absence elsewhere.

Listening:

• Real Vikings — Not sure I’d necessarily recommend this but I am listening to it, mostly to send myself to sleep, so it deserves a mention. (I already know my Viking lore thanks to watching the gloriously schlocky Vikings TV show and then binging Wikipedia to fill the many gaps.)

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds — The episode where Bunny Colvin from The Wire stops by.
• This Is a Gardening Show with Zach Galifianakis — So, so very good and criminally short.