The last time that the president-elect was indisputably seen in public, was at his inaugural rally at which a third presumed unsuccessful attempt on his life resulted in his being whisked away and out of sight. After a night of panic by his supporters, a reassuring video was released of the now President, sitting up in his hospital bed and raising a fist in a defiant gesture. Thereafter, the POTUS made no live appearances, his team stating that three attempts on his life were quite enough. The irony was that the techniques which had served the president during his candidacy for re-election, to smear opponents, were now used to supplant the presence of the ageing and unstable would-be dictator. Deep fakes, AI-generated speeches flowed forth, for God knows, there were enough speeches to train the AIs in the rambling, vitriolic, and emotion-soaked appeal that was the President’s trademark. The crew that had pushed the president forward over the last four years, not to mention his long-suffering wife, breathed a sigh of relief and prompted the AIs to generate a more coherent presidency which went exactly to plan…
Winter has come forth freezing forever the fruit of misbegotten dreams…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day! The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
In 2022, worldwide trade in Zinc Ore was worth $14.1 billion and it was the 297th most traded product.
If you have ever looked at say, steel railings and noticed a blotchiness to the surface, you are looking at crystals of zinc applied by hot dipping the steel (Galvanising) to protect it from rust.
Zinc is an important metal that has been used since ancient times – long before the element was properly isolated and named. It is also vital to life as a trace element but can be toxic in excess. It has many uses – one third goes to galvanising steel and iron and so as a commodity, watching the demand for steel – especially in China, is a key indicator of demand. Other uses include alloying – most notably with copper to form brass, Diecasting metal parts for such things as Automobile parts, zinc oxide is used in many industries, including paint, rubber, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, plastics, inks, soaps, batteries, textiles, and electrical equipment, and Zinc sulfide is an important component in many products, including luminous paints, fluorescent lights, and x-ray screens.
You may have noticed that the trading figures at top refer to Zinc Ore rather than Zinc itself which suggests that the places that mine the ore do not necessarily wish to refine the ore into metal and in any case, as we can see from the use of zinc compounds above, metal is not always the desired form of zinc. It also suggests that the zinc content of the ore is sufficiently concentrated as to make shipping the ore financially viable. The diagrams below show the major exporters and importers of Zinc ore.
You will notice that the largest producer is Australia and the largest company mining Zinc there is Rio Tinto – in fact at one time it was known as RTZ – Rio Tinto Zinc. In recent years, Rio Tinto (you can read their history here) were embroiled in a massive scandal after they blew up an aboriginal shelter in the Juukan Gorge which had evidence of continuous use for 46,000 years – in other words – throughout the last Ice Age! Although this demolition was in order to expand an iron ore mine, it brings into sharp relief the colonial occupation of lands all over the world and the issue of who has ownership of the land and mineral rights – the native populations or the colonial occupiers. As a result of the worldwide condemnation of this act of cultural vandalism, the Western Australian government was able, just this March, to ram through bipartisan legislation further protecting aboriginal lands although as the deadline for the implementation of the act approaches, there is huge debate about the perceived draconian nature of its clauses and what impact that will have on Australia’s economy – choice, choices…
The carpet-bagging, swashbuckling, vicious age of Imperialism and Colonisation may be in the rearview mirror of the past but aboriginal/native peoples around the world are finding a voice in the present and questioning their right to own what was taken from them and where such actions are taking place in what were remote sites out of sight of the world, are now open to live scrutiny and monitoring in the modern age of satellite technology and the whole world is connected by an internet that can mobilise at an instant – so no longer are dark deeds out of sight – out of mind… If laws like those in Australia make it more difficult to exploit the environment without concern for the planet and the local environment of the extraction, then it gives us pause for thought. Of course, some native peoples may be delighted to benefit from resource extraction, but more commonly, those people’s attitude to the environment is one of stewardship and we could learn from their wisdom. We also have to be careful that if a battle for the benefit of the environment is won in one place where vocal stewards succeed in making their voice heard, the environment of some other, less visible part of the world does not suffer instead – we live in a global village and there is no place to shit with impunity – as the effects of global warming are increasingly demonstrating. Unfortunately, it is still the case – as it ever was – that the resources we “need” often come from the Third World and so it is doubly unfair that they are the ones suffering the most from Climate Change. If Zinc could only be found beneath New York, how different do you imagine the extraction process would be?
Because Zinc was not fully recognised or understood in ancient times , even if it was contributing to metallurgy in instances such as Brass – and the many uses of Zinc in the modern world only followed on from 18th century developments in smelting – zinc or its compounds were discarded in earlier mining of other metals such as lead (zinc often occurs with lead and other metals) and the dumps of the past mining operations can leach zinc and cadmium into the environment polluting rivers. A little zinc may be necessary for life but too much is toxic.
Zinc is used as the anode in Zinc-Carbon batteries and its property of attracting oxidisation to itself above othe r metals, means it is used as a sacrificial anode – attach a strip of zinc to an iron rudder and the zinc will gradually erode but not the iron. There is so much to say about Zinc but we are nearing the end of the A-Z Challenge 2024 and both I, and I imagine you, dear reader, are getting saturated with reading and so if you want to know more facts about all aspects of Zinc, then Wikipedia, as ever has an excellent article…
And so to the poem of the day – the form is Zuhitsu and unlike other poetic forms originating in Japan, this is no tightly specified set of rules about syllable count, line length or even appropriate subject matter – meaning “Follow the brush…” – Zuhitu is the very opposite! Although seen as early as 1002 AD, you could be forgiven for mistaking it as very modern because it is eclectic, “composed largely of interwoven writings in prose and poetry on ideas or subjects that typically respond to the author’s surroundings” (American Academy of Poetry). It is not unlike the modern Lyric Essay an example of which is Cluadia Rankine’s ground-breaking American Lyric trilogy, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004), Citizen (2014) and Just Us (2020) – you can read an extraact here. Another modern eponymous example is “Zuhitsu” by Jenny Xie. It seems appropriate that as I draw to a close my theme of Commodities, and as I reflect on the themes of imperialism, exploitation and environmental damage, this is the final poetry form I encounter…
Zinc – a Zuhitsu
I like to trace the outline of zinc crystals in the galvanised surface of metal railings – a secret of chemistry hiding in plain sight for those who know. How dull the world without that knowledge and how multi-layered my view is – like wearing Google glasses and looking upwards to see “Blue sky – an effect of atmospheric diffusion of sunlight” superimposed across the sky. Does it spoil the sky to be so emblazoned? No I turn off my knowledge at will and simply enjoy the change from blue to black and all the sunset colours in between.
We are all the children of chemistry, and physics melded together in biology and we need to know the elements that make us tick even though we hand that research off to specialists – trust them to find the answers and point us down the paths of health – learn what you can, from ancient practices like naturopathy to modern science explained in clearest terms in New Scientist – inhabit yourself through knowledge applied with wisdom.
I am growing old – sixty-nine journeys round the sun and each time my cells regenerate (I am not the man I used to be) they accumulate tiny errors like a multi-generational photocopy which in my case manifest as wrinkles, age spots – blotches of brown on the backs of my hands. A secretary’s cheeky photocopy of a breast unwisely persuaded at an office party, once copied then copied again and again would too, lose its perky perfection…
I drink an effervescent, orange flavoured glass of Vitamin C with Zinc each morning in case a deficiency of zinc might hasten my end by means of multi -faceted effects on my body and I know I should read the science and see whether it is necessary or whether I have just been seduced by the marketing but I haven’t yet – after all, I’m only human…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day
It’s some times hard to find the exact date figures for each commodity and for Kerosene I commend this site for its excellent infographic on producers and importers of kerosene (even if it is 1998 and not 2022 as I have tried to stick to…)
The Lady with the Lamp…
One of the iconic images of the early Nineteenth Century, is that of Florence Nightingale depicted as “The Lady with the Lamp” and I imagined that she might have used some sort of oil lamp and that might be a good place to start with talking about kerosene, but the truth of this image is rather more complicated.
I already mentioned Kerosene under the letter H for Heating Oil as a commodity and Kerosene is a specific form of Paraffin derived from Crude Oil distillation. Kerosene can be used contemporarily as heating oil but also as aviation fuel, rocket fuel and it was one used as a replacement for whale oil in lamps, much to the relief of whales who were being hunted to the brink of extinction by the 1860’s. The growing scarcity of whales raised the price of whale oil as a commodity and drove the search for alternatives such as petroleum-derived Kerosene. So today I want to examine the historical importance of Kerosene as a major commodity for lighting.
Going back to “The Lady with the Lamp” for a moment – The Florence Nightingale Museum exhibits a Turkish Fanoos lantern which it claims is the correct type of lamp that the eponymous inventor of The Nightingale Ward would have used. This is a concertina-style paper lantern – a collapsible travelling lantern which would have had a candle inside. Candles, incidentally, can be made from Paraffin Wax – another product closely related to Kerosene. But the more romantic image of Florence Nightingale carrying a Greek or “genie” lamp burning some form of oil, caught the public imagination more after several depictions of such – so much so, that “A further layer of meaning was added to the lamp with the foundation of the Nightingale Training School in 1860. The oil lamp was already a symbol of learning because it had enabled reading in the hours of darkness since classical times. Now the lamp came to represent nurse education.”
Oil lamps had been used for thousands of years often vegetable oils so in the Mediterranean countries this would have been Olive Oil. There were many seeps of crude oil around the world and one of the oldest attempts to extract oil for lighting oil, is the Persian scholar Rāzi, who created a form of kerosene by filtering petroleum through an alembic with materials like clay. It was not until 1854 that “a Polish pharmacist, Ignacy Łukasiewicz, invented the kerosene lamp – a device that quickly went on to light up Europe. He also went on to open the first oil mine and kerosene refinery in the world, becoming a pioneer of the oil business.” In America, “Until the late 19th century, an oil find often was met with disinterest or dismay. Pioneers who settled the American West dug wells to find water or brine, a source of salt; they were disappointed when they struck oil”. But with the perfection of the method of extracting kerosene from crude oil, the new commodity was set to take over from Whale oil and literally save their blubber.
Later, the major commodity to be extracted from Crude Oil, would become Gasoline which we encountered under “G” – which just goes to show how commodities can change over time. Whole industries such as whaling (1780-1860) can rise and fall in less than a hundred years. Likewise, the shift from crude oil’s importance as a source of kerosene lamp oil was eclipsed by the advent of electric light although it gained a new lease of with the advent of jet engines and as a heating oil and the gasoline fuelled the growth of the motor car and the asphalt created the roads for cars to run on until every fraction of crude oil was utilised for something – spanning many separate commodity markets.
The other narrative running through this evolution of commodities, is the way that we humans have exploited the natural world for whatever riches our burgeoning “civilisation” has required. Vegetable oil lamps were sustainable, whale oil lamps nearly extinguished whales and fossil fuels are largely responsible for the unfolding disaster of climate change! Hmmm…
And so to today’s poem which at “K”, brings us to a French poetry form called the Kyrielle. “written in quatrains (a stanza consisting of 4 lines), and each quatrain contains a repeating line or phrase as a refrain (usually appearing as the last line of each stanza). Each line within the poem consists of only eight syllables. There is no limit to the amount of stanzas a Kyrielle may have, but three is considered the accepted minimum. Some popular rhyming schemes for a Kyrielle are: aabB, ccbB, ddbB, with B being the repeated line, or abaB, cbcB, dbdB. Mixing up the rhyme scheme it’s possible for an unusual pattern of: axaZ, bxbZ, cxcZ, dxdZ, etc. with Z being the repeated line.”
Kerosene – A Kyrielle
Homes once lit by Whale Oil lamps were the reason why whales were hunted – long before the “Save the Whales” camp ‘twas Kerosene saved the whales.
Kerosene a component of crude oil scars our skies with jet vapour trails but when whalers ceased their toil then Kerosene saved the whales!
Electric lamps made safer homes then aviation took up the slack made tourists of us – ones who roam but kerosene saved the whales!
Whale watching is the latest fad no matter how much Kerosene burnt do you not realise it’s mad when Kerosene saved the whales
only to have them share our fate and all die from global warming we denying it till it’s too late – did kerosene save the whales…?
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide Trade in Gasoline 2022 $16.86 Billion Worldwide Trade in Gold 2022 $14.568 Trillion
When I first researched a list of “Commodities”, Gold and Gasoline were the only two which came up for “G” on the best list I could find, but what a pair! Gold has been sought for centuries – valued for its incorruptible nature though it has arguably been one of the greatest sources of corruption of the human heart. Similarly, crude oil – the source of Gasoline, has shaped the political map ever since its component “gifts” were discovered and exploited with disastrous consequences for many peoples and for the world and its environment as a whole. So I decided to deal with both these commodities together – one constant and immutable, the other volatile, expendable and dangerous…
Gasoline is used for transportation and energy production worldwide and is severely implicated in global warming as a result of CO² emissions. The spread of the motorcar through the 20th century reshaped our lives and living arrangements and wars have been fought to secure, steal or destroy other’s oil sources. Arguably. The US, as the largest consumer has fought an undeclared war against the Arab nations since the Second World War to assure the flow of oil although it began with an alliance with Saudi Arabia that promised guaranteed oil supplies in return for non-interference with the Wahabist-based sect of Islam which was espoused there. The consequences of that are another story, but Iraq and Libya (a country that shared its oil wealth amongst its people in an unprecedented way) are but some of the victims of US-led wars designed to keep the best oil flowing in the “right” direction. The oil lobby is the greatest source of “climate deniers” although the car lobby and many car drivers are equally denying that Climate Change is happening and man-made.
A salutary tale of the corruption that surrounds commodities such as oil (and gold), is the recent movie Killers of the Flower Moon, in which members of the Osage tribe of Native American Indians are at first surfeited in wealth (see above) derived from the rights to oil found on their land but how an unscrupulous local politician then seeks to murder them and acquire their lands into his family.
Gold has also been a source of conflict and a regulator of success in wars as this article outlines. Paper money used to be backed by reserves of the actual gold which it symbolised and this was known as the “Gold Standard” and although this system has been replaced everywhere by the Fiat system the prevalence of inflation as a result of the severing of the link, has risen worldwide. Having gold bullion reserves finances wars – for example, it is estimated that Californian gold was responsible for 10% of the cost of the American Civil War. The UK had access to gold produced by mines in its colonies such as South Africa which the mines were obliged to sell to the treasury whilst over the course of the two World wars, Germany had no such access and so the UK was able to pay for some of the food and armaments that came from the US (and borrowed the rest which it only paid off in 2006).
Gold Fields South Deep Mine The Twin Shaft Complex comprises a Main and Ventilation Shaft. The Main Shaft extends in a single drop to 2,998m below surface, while the ventilation shaft extends to a depth of 2,947m below the surface. That’s almost 3 kilometres…
Oil and thence Gasoline prices are also levers of power in war e.g. the embargo on Russian oil in response to the war in Ukraine although to pull those levers means adversely affecting the price of oil commodities and the US has to try to persuade its Arab producer allies to release more product to stabilise the market. The price of gold and oil or gasoline (their markets show some different behaviours) are some of the most important commodity trading standards in the market and the first thing that many in the know will look at each morning.
Of course, gold has decorative and cultural uses as well as bullion – jewellery, crowns, ceremonial cups and it is because it doesn’t tarnish or corrode that it has had this value since ancient times and so is one of the earliest commodities to be traded.
And so to the poem and having recently written a Ghazal, I decided to try a Glosa…
Glosa, or glose, is a form originally from Spain, featuring a quatrain epigraph, and four ten-line stanzas with the last line of each stanza being the corresponding line of the epigraph. The key to the form is that it incorporates the words of another. The glosser, or glosador, advertises a connection to a prior text.
Gold and Gasoline
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold […] Hoarded, bartered, bought and sold, […] Price of many a crime untold …
Gold has commanded lust of kings and beggars both who wish for things or for gold’s sake alone a useless dragon’s hoard coins, bullion bars and rings miners gave their lives for it soldiers died protecting it across the globe merchants trade the metal that will never fade Price of many a crime untold …
Shallow mines are damp and cold deep in the Earth’s heat lies the gold where miners in the new South Africa still sweat to feed the dragon’s hoard a ring with which to have and hold a brooch to sparkle and attract the eye a sovereign, symbol of King and country pays for the soldiers’ dice with death to die or win and maybe loot a little wealth Price of many a crime untold …
And gasoline’s story is much the same black gold fought over in the Great Game of nations tampering with other nations to keep their cars moving, lights burning the destruction of Libya a tale of infamy the treasures of Iraq to the winds scattered because compared to oil, culture didn’t matter and wars are won and lost by oil’s logistics and the market’s fluctuating statistics Price of many a crime untold …
Whilst gold has spawned so many crimes it doesn’t threaten climate-changing times it will not end our human hubris and rarely even give us bliss as when we ring the wedding chimes both have brought us good and bad and if we perish, though very sad we only have ourselves to blame for seeking gold and gas – the same Price of many a crime untold …
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Frost Futures – yes you read it right – you can buy futures in Frost and other weather phenomena! This is at the heart of trading futures as a hedge against the unexpected and though you might argue that frost itself is not a commodity, yet its impact on many grown commodities is potentially devastating and trading in weather futures is a way of insuring against loss… What I have not been able to find are any meaningful figures for the trade in Frost Futures since this is still a rather exotic trade!
Here are some quotes from the CME Group who specialise in Weather Futures:-
“The common cliché is that every conversation begins and ends with the weather. That’s probably because weather is the most common and pervasive risk factor for individuals or businesses. […] a decisive majority of senior finance and risk managers confirm that their businesses are significantly impacted by the weather and a stunning eight out of 10 warn of a new risk: that the emergence of global climate change and accompanying volatile weather patterns will require changes to their business models in the decades ahead. […] Weather cannot be controlled. But with the introduction of the products we offer, its blame for company losses is no longer justifiable. Weather, like any commodity, can be traded and its risks mitigated. Our Weather products offer the ability to manage volumetric risk or the risk due to variability in sales revenues, caused by weather-related fluctuation in levels of consumption.”
Forgive the corporate language but in essence – trading in futures is gambling and weather futures are a way of hedging your bets… That’s it – short and sweet, other commodities beginning with F include Feeder Cattle and Fish and if you are wondering what Feeder Cattle are – they are young cattle which are sold on (often a byproduct of dairy herds who need repeat pregnancies to maintain milk production) for fattening up before selling.
And so to the poem which today is Free Verse – a form which often seems to be the most ubiquitous among modern poets. Free Verse does not use meter or rhyme, but is still are recognisable as ‘poetry’ by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. (Language is a Virus…)
A beautiful assassin calls at night you can never be sure when you may stand guard in your garden gazing at the glittering array in the heavens revealed by a clear sky and feel in your bones she is lurking but she will wait till cold has driven you to your warm bed and in the early hours she will grip plants squeezing them to death by freezing the life blood in their very veins
You will awaken to a white wonderland of sparkling crystals coating the world and await the sun’s sufficient elevation to melt the assassin’s work and reveal the extent of the damage the body-count the wilting and the dying the seedlings cut down in their infancy and even as you curse the late and unpredictable frost’s devastation counting the cost planning the re-planting you cannot help but admire the beauty…
The dual theme of my A to Z Challenge this year is the world of Commodities and Poetry Forms so the juxtaposition of these two themes may throw up some strange poems – could there be a Heroic Ode to Heating Oil or will it merit a Haiku or a Haibun – whichever, I will be endeavouring to bring you interesting facts about commodities that may change the way you think about the stuff we variously depend on…
By commodity I mean certain items that are of both sufficient value/volume to be traded in special markets and are generally volatile enough to attract traders in “Futures” which are a way of hedging bets in the trading world of stocks, shares and commodities.
The A to Z Challenge runs throughout April and will consist of 26 posts – there are only a couple of letters for which I couldn’t find commodities but plenty of poetry forms to carry the day!
Worldwide Trade in Barley 2022 $10.4 Billion
Barley is the oldest cultivated grain and still the forth most cultivated after maize, wheat, and rice. Bere was the Old English word for Barley and the word Barley comes from the Old English bærlic. The Old English bere-aern meaning “barley-store” gives us the modern word barn and showing the importance of this ancient grain. Grinding stones near the Sea of Galilee reveal traces of barley starch from 23,000years ago and by 9,000 years ago, domesticated barley (unable to reproduce without human assistance) is found throughout the Fertile Crescent including Mesopotamia, sometimes thought to be the original Garden of Eden.
Botanical illustration of leafy stem with roots, flowers, and 2- and 6-row ears
In 2022, 155 million tonnes of barley were grown worldwide with Russia in the lead at 15% followed by France Germany and Canada. You can read more details about all aspects of Barley here. However, the thing to be concerned about over barley as a commodity is that it is threatened by Climate Change. Modern barley ideally likes a cool climate without too much rain which is perhaps why it enjoys northern continental interiors but even these areas are threatened by the rising temperatures of global warming and the unpredictable extremes of weather events that bring heavy rain to unaccustomed areas…
Seventy percent of barley goes to animal feed which vegetarians would answer is a wasteful way for humans to raise protein, but the other thirty percent is eaten (or drunk) by humans but if climate change disrupts the crop, will animal feed be the first to succumb to unpredictability with humans feeding directly on whatever has managed to be grown?
With barley being eaten in such a wide range of countries, there are many varieties of soups, stews, gruels and porridges not to mention bread made from barley flour. But barley is also fermented to produce malt which is the sugar basis of both many beers and of whisky and these liquids are ascribed as the gifts to mankind of John Barleycorn who was the subject of many ballads variously personifying the harvest and transformation of barley into booze…
John Barleycorn (image by Midjourney)
Healthwise, a 100-gram portion of barley can provide 10% of the required Daily value of some essential nutrients – fibre, the B vitamin niacin, and dietary minerals, including iron and manganese. It does however contain gluten so it is not suitable for those who are gluten-intolerant. It can aid in the regulation of both blood sugar and blood pressure.
Barley is not the only crop which is and will increasingly suffer from climate change, but it illustrates clearly the coming doom scenario if we fail to act to halt the slide into global warming.
And so to today’s poem – a recently coined form – a Bop poem! The Bop was created by Afaa Michael Weaver during a summer retreat of the African American poetry organization, Cave Canem. The Poets.org defines the Bop as “The first stanza (six lines long) states the problem, and the second stanza (eight lines long) explores or expands upon the problem. If there is a resolution to the problem, the third stanza (six lines long) finds it. If a substantive resolution cannot be made, then this final stanza documents the attempt and failure to succeed.” So here goes…
Barley
Barley enjoys a cool climate but not too much rain but global warming also means increased precipitation, we may have to eschew John Barleycorn’s barley malt but losing liquor is the least of it if climate change can’t halt. this oldest of grains is still the fourth most cultivated crop so food for animals and people around the world might stop.
Animals eat seventy percent of the barley. Some know only soup with Pearl Barley but bred to lose its hull is Hull-less Barley which pre-cooked and dried is Quick Cooking Barley, longer to cook is only lightly polished Pot Barley, similar to steel-cut oats are Barley Grits, and like rolled oats, Barley Flakes are flattened bits of a grain that’s eaten in so many places its crop loss with hunger will over-face us.
The third stanza of a Bop poem seeks resolution but I see no solution to this sad situation, those traders in stocks and shares who seek to hedge their bets with grown wares will find Soft Commodities have and make bad Futures if we’ve tipped the climate past the point of rupture…
Other Commodities beginning with B include Beef and Bitumen. Beef, as is discussed with Barley above, is the least efficient way of producing protein of all animals since you have to put masses of other protein in to get there and as well, cattle are accused of contributing to greenhouse gasses and thus global warming with all their farting and burping methane. There are some minor measures which are beginning to alleviate those things but more significant is that the demand for beef continues to grow and that means bringing more land into agriculture including forestry. Just because people in developed countries want to eat more meat and don’t directly see the Amazon rainforest being cut down to make way for ranching, does not mean it is not affecting them through climate change. You can read a good article by the World Resources Institute weighing up the factors around beef and the environment here.
Bitumen is a byproduct of refining crude oil – the very last item to come out of fractional distillation and it is of course, the binder in tarmac or asphalt which makes the roads that the petrol-driven motor cars drive on. If bitumen was not used up in this way then it would be a horrendous waste product to be disposed of. So the growth of the motor car and the spreading of roads were pretty much synchronised and conversely, if – and it is a big if – we transition fully to electric vehicles, then the cessation of oil refining will mean a cessation of bitumen availability and considering that electric vehicles will still need roads… As a commodity, bitumen is pretty closely allied to the cost of crude oil and the price of that is a whole other can of worms!
Other poetry forms I might have chosen beginning with B include the Ballad, the Blazon (though it might be difficult to frame Barley as the beloved), Blank Verse, and the Ballat.
This post by Di on Pandamoniumcat’s Blog, is in response to the No vote in the recent Australian Referendum on the issue of Constitutional recognition of Australia’s indigenous people. Failure to recognise the existence of people who already lived in the land you took can never end well and hopefully, this is not the end of the road for this cause… It was posted in response to For Dverse Poets Meeting the Bar: A Collective Point of View
We have gone far beyond a love affair with the car, the motor car, the automobile, we are beyond the comfortable love of wedded bliss and we have reached the time when divorce must be considered, with all the compromises and new freedoms that implies…
The Love Affair
And it was a Love affair to begin with! Admittedly, one that could only be pursued by the rich – the freedom given to those Edwardian pioneers, to go further than on horseback, to travel in a group, and oh! the speed – think of Toad in The Wind in the Willows – “Poop, poop!”! Then came The First World War with lorries and ambulances. The interwar years when cars spread to the middle classes and finally, after The Second World War, we were truly wedded to the car, cars for all but the poorest and our world and lives changing beyond recognition.
Urban Sprawl and the Escape to the Country…
How were we seduced into these changes and what form did they take? It’s a tale of city and countryside, of congestion and the freedom of “the open road”. We live, mostly, in cities and towns but we dream, most of us, of living in the country. How many people drive 4-wheel drive monsters that were originally designed for country-dwelling landowners but became must-have status symbols of the urban elite – Chelsea Tractors as they are known – how many of those owners ever go off-road or ever use their 4-wheel drive? Incidentally, these huge cars, often justified as being safer for your family (if you can afford them)- take an unjustified amount of both materials and energy to construct, so that’s a very un-Green and inequitable contribution to Climate Change right there!
Advertising campaigns focus on a romantic image of the SUV as the car of the great outdoors.
Levelling Up
Recent changes in internet technology and in working practices stimulated by the Covid lockdown, mean that we can work wherever we want to – from home or at the office, the office usually being in the city and the home wherever we choose or can afford. But in this respect, those who live in the country, are still disadvantaged since the high-speed optical transmission available in cities, has not always yet reached the countryside. There is a clamour from rural populations for a levelling up so that the commuters, enabled post-war, by the motor car to live outside the cities, and commute in to work, may not be disadvantaged by slower broadband, that they may take full advantage of living in the country.
There are other things not available in the rural areas, such as supermarkets – another phenomenon that grew with the car, because even if you live in the city, the supermarket, unlike the corner shop, is likely to be some distance away from home and how else are you to manage to get a weekly shop home without a car? Food, DIY, furnishings, and any kind of specialist shops are in the urban environment and unavailable out in the country – at least if you want to touch and feel goods – because we now have online shopping. Assuming your broadband is fast enough for shopping online, you can order things online, have them delivered (by motor vehicle – anything from a lorry to a private car) and if it does not match the expectation (that touch and feel would have obviated) you can send it back, by vehicle again – still it’s better to have one vehicle doing a round of rural locations than dozens of rural dwellers motoring into town and back… This leads to other, less obvious environmental impacts – clothing retailers are very poor at standardising garment sizes so consumers may order a minimum of three items to bracket their size and having tried them on, return two of them, which the retailer cannot be bothered to repack and resell – best case they go to a third-party retailer like TK Maxx – worst case, they go to landfill, still in their torn-open plastic bags. 92 million tons of clothing end up in landfills. Only 20% of textiles are collected for reuse or recycling globally.
The Suburban Deserts…
It is not just country- dwellers who are dependent on cars – as the car became more widely owned between the war – ribbon development spread out along the arterial roads stretching out from the cities towards those aspirational countryside locations and post-Second World War, the spaces between those roads were infilled with suburban housing estates. These estates were not provided with shops or pubs and buses – buses still modelled on earlier urban trams, did not, on the whole, extend their routes into these estates (as they do now, using smaller buses) – so another “driver” towards mass ownership of the car. There is now guidance on how to design housing estates in order to be bus-friendly but it depends on local authorities being prepared to press this home.
-and “Liberation”
Once you had a car, many other uses for it became apparent and were catered to, holidays at the coast demanded an ever-improving road network and the upgrading of A-roads to motorways and with car ferries and later, the Euro-Tunnel, motorists could even take their cars abroad if only to stock up with beer and fags on a day trip to France. How much was saved when the petrol was factored in, I wonder? Trips to the dump, car-boot sales, lazy trips to the corner shop, driving the kids to school, sometimes even when the distance is walkable and the exercise would do both kids and parents good, Z-cars (car crime demands police cars), driving to watch motor racing, banger racing, picnics in the rain, dogging, actually making babies, babies being born and too many people dying in cars– and so it goes on – the love affair was over and we became truly wedded to our cars.
Divorce
Divorce is going to be painful and it is going to have to happen, because there can no longer be any doubt that climate change is happening and happening faster and more damagingly than we imagined possible. The time for tinkering about with lightbulb replacement is past, we must all take more serious steps towards doing our bit to arrest the worsening problems affecting rich and poor countries alike, though the effect on poor countries is worse and the contributory factors of any kind of mitigation lie with the rich ones. Changing lightbulbs was, initially, a costly outlay because the energy-efficient bulbs were not cheap, but then came LED and suddenly lighting fixtures themselves changed and every public building must change colour constantly at night. However, even changing lightbulbs was a struggle to sell to people initially – because of the cost – even if the long-term effect was a saving – it was cash upfront and savings later and we humans are not good at deferred gratification. If lightbulbs were hard, how much harder will it be to make serious changes in our car usage? No wedded person wants to get divorced, not least because of the massive cost both financial and emotional and this divorce is no different – when you blow up a life together, it’s hard to believe there might even be any upside, or be able to see beyond the chaos to a new and settled life…
Like a divorce, changing our relationship with the car is not going to be a single, simple matter, no more than you can change housing, separate finances, account for custody of children, divvy up the record collection, who gets the dog, who keeps the friends, let alone the emotional toll, good breakups, the bad breakups, the goodbye sex, the loss of support and confidant – divorce is messy and the solutions are multi-faceted and often unique to each couple and it will be no different with the car. Going electric is only a part of the story and presently, a dubious part at that – so let’s examine some of the many parts that might contribute to the solution.
Social Changes
There are two avenues to be considered – the technological and the behavioural and neither is easy or straightforward. Taking the social first, there have been studies showing that already, some people would save money by ditching their own cars and simply hiring a car for those occasions that they need them – holidays, weddings, big shopping trips but many would question the use of the word “simply” because nothing is without any cost – yes you would need to plan ahead and make a booking but is that really so onerous? Yes – you would no longer have a status symbol that you feel reflects something about you sitting on your drive and some people might think you “gone down in the world” for leaving the ranks of the car owners – but then again, many would applaud you…
Good Government – Hands On or Hands Off?
Another example of the need for social attitude change is the term “Public Transport” which now carries a whiff of class distinction – let us rechristen it as Green Transport or Make a Friend Transport – for in the words of a British railway advert – “Let the Train Take the Strain!” – I can vouch for this as after breaking hip in a car crash, I was unable to drive for at least a year and enjoyed travelling by bus to my nearest city, some 35 miles away so much, that I didn’t return to driving a car for five years. Not only was I able to more fully enjoy the beautiful scenery where I lived back then, but the bus afforded me the opportunity to meet people I would otherwise not chanced to talk to… By contrast, the Conservative party here in the UK, took great pride in announcing via posters at railway stations, how the UK had the lowest subsidy for railways of any country, however the list that the poster detailed, might have been the list of railway operators from best to worst, with the UK at the bottom. The Conservatives are the party of the car and they also adopted, as part of Neoliberalism, the idea that for governments to govern – to make considered decisions about what works best for the country and nudge or even legislate for it – is a bad thing and that market forces (read unabashed greed and profiteering) should determine the course of things. They sold off (euphemism – De-nationalised) British Rail, breaking it up into a series of franchises operated by the highest bidder and disastrously, made the rails themselves, the purview of another company. Operating for profit almost always means cutting corners and this, plus the disjuncture between infrastructure and operators, contributed, in large part to many incidents, the worst of which was the Reading Station crash in which six people died and sixty-one were injured. Major rail crashes also occurred at Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield, Potters Bar and Stonehaven.
There are already schemes bringing commuters together such as Car Pooling where people who work together, or in nearby home/job locations, share car and/or petrol expenses – what if we took this idea further wherein people within a given neighbourhood would belong to a co-owned carpool and could book a car suitable for “the day that’s in it “– a small runaround for taking and collecting the kids from school or doing the weekly shop and an estate car for that annual holiday – perhaps even a sports car to impress on that first date… There might need to be changes to insurance rules to facilitate such schemes but it’s not insuperable. In Canada, the distances to be travelled are vast and although it is illegal to hitchhike anywhere except at a petrol station, it is common to accept passengers who pay their share of the petrol. All these ideas are facilitated by online connections – either informal or actual websites, and this demonstrates both that people are willing to co-operate for a change benefitting the environment, even if there are some small inconveniences in co-ordinating themselves and secondly that these things, once mooted, can be organised from the grassroots up – with a minimum of governmental interference but perhaps the odd facilitation.
The Lessons of Oxford
I grew up in Oxford and would naturally have ridden a bicycle as soon as I was old enough even if I hadn’t had a father who became a crusader for “Intermediate Technology” (simple rather than high-tech solutions). I never learned to drive until I was 35 and had stopped living in London where I continued to ride a bicycle when possible or took public transport – busses or trains if the weather was inclement. If more people took to bikes and public transport, there would be fewer cars on the road and the benefits would be safer cycling, healthier bodies as well as the immediate environmental benefits – think Amsterdam or Oxford. Oxford has embraced and been the testbed for every measure to try and reign in the motor car. First it built a Ring Road or Bypass coupled with creating one-way streets that made it less attractive to go through the centre. Far from killing commerce in towns, many places have discovered that a more car-free city centre is such a boon that it promotes shopping, eating and sightseeing! Next, Oxford introduced bus lanes (which also facilitate bicycles and taxis) and shortly after, Park-and-Ride schemes. The latest scheme in Oxford has however, brought a backlash, not exclusively from those immediately affected (or benefitted, depending on your point of view) but as a rallying point for car defenders from far and wide who see Oxford’s latest experiment as the thin edge of the wedge – the enforcing of automotive divorce. What is this dastardly attack on the institution of marriage to the car? It stems from the idea of the “Fifteen Minute City” That every city be divided into neighbourhoods within which all the essential needs for living – shops, pubs, meeting places, bus routes out – should all be found within a fifteen-minute walking distance – innocuous you might think, but Oxford’s implementation – a retrospective planning measure, is to ring-fence such neighbourhoods with car-barriers to limit ingress and egress for cars – and this has been seen by some as a totally unwarranted attack, not just on car owners, but on their very human rights! Protesters were not merely local residents but car supporters from far and wide who flocked to oppose the dastardly council who dared to challenge the rights of the motorist! In our necessary divorce from the motor car – a front line has been drawn… True, such cellular enclaves have been devised before by town planners – anyone who has visited a friend in the suburbs of that planned city, Milton Keynes, will know the nightmare of entering such a cell and then not being able to find the way out. Not least, this is because the suburban cells of Milton Keynes were designed without the shops and facilities that would have made them into 15-minute solutions but would also have provided landmarks for navigation in a sea of identical housing. Planning for the future means making sure that housing estates are more than just housing, that the cars are parked or garaged around the outside of neighbourhoods, or at least, like the mews coach-houses of old – at the back of the houses with pedestrian thoroughfares leading to shops et al, at the front. Private developers are particularly notorious for neglecting to build any community facilities and merely cramming as many houses with concomitant roads, drives and garages as it takes to carry the occupants out of their housing only ghetto. Reto-fitting is, as Oxford has discovered, more challenging still…
Technological Options
Turning to the technological options for environmental solutions to divorce us from the CO2 emitting motor cars, vans and lorries – “What of the electric vehicle?” I hear you say. Setting aside the fact that you still have to generate the electricity to power electric vehicles and all the difficulties in weaning power generation off fossil fuels, there are major flaws in the current approach to electric cars.
The current generation of electric cars is predicated on the idea that people want a car that does exactly the same things as the cars they will be giving up – carry five people, travel at 70 miles per hour or more, have a capacious boot, carry forward all the crumple zone technology which keeps us safe, up to a point, in the event of a crash – and it is worth remembering that it has been determined that once over 30 m.p.h. – there is very little that a driver can do to influence the outcome of a crash and also, that the speed of impact in a collision between two cars is the sum of their two speeds so two cars travelling at 30 m.p.h. smash together at 60 m.p.h. Of course, if we travelled much slower, then such high-speed collisions and the ingenious and weighty crumple zones which have been designed to protect us in such events, would be less necessary.
What has disappointed me about these new electric cars is that they look exactly as before, take the same massive amount of energy and share of Earth’s resources to construct, worse if you think of the issues around Lithium for the batteries and they are, at this stage affordable only by the relatively rich. I had imagined a wholly new style of lightweight runarounds – cars perhaps a little like the Smart cars – economical two-seaters, but if you want to achieve all the old requirements of a car listed above, then you have to go big – as big as existing cars, because you cannot fit a big enough battery to supply the range or speed to carry the weigh of all that crumple zone protective steel in a small car. It just can’t be done, and in any case, the first adopters of electric cars are the better off and it has been much easier to sell them the idea of going green by simply changing to a “greener” propulsion of an equally capable large car rather than that of a small one which they are not in the market for anyway.
Small is Beautifull…1
If we accept the reality that people who live and mostly drive only in cities, neither need a high-performance large car nor can utilise the capacities of such cars due to congestion slowing things down, then would it not be better, for when you need to use a car, to have a small electric vehicle! There is a class of cars termed Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles (how friendly does that sound!) which are small, light weight, much less greedy in manufacturing and material costs, and travel at the modest speeds actually suitable for driving in urban environs. That they have not gained greater popularity is in part due to the hazard of driving such lightweight cars in a mix with larger, faster, heavier beasts and partly due to the failure to grasp the necessity of switching to such vehicles.
Electric cars are not a new idea, in fact, they were quite common until petrol engines gained ascendancy, what about the electric milk-float – operating with heavy lead-acid batteries rather than the current lighter-weight Lithium ones, these workhorses carried a good load, travelled at moderate speeds and had enough range to get the job done – proof that a realistic spec. for an urban vehicle is eminently possible!
What if, instead of trying to change habits by applying punitive Low Emission and Congestion Charges to big cities (which become rallying points for the motoring rights lobby) we take joined-up government decisions to promote cities being small electric vehicle zones? What does joined up mean in this context? It means first promoting the manufacture of such vehicles up to and past the point of mass adoption, facilitating charging points by legislation where necessary (ie. all new homes to include them), and only then enforcing the adoption of the small vehicles in cities. Those who want to retain their old-style monsters might be forced to leave them in outskirt car parks and continue their journeys inward with a small vehicle or a bus. To get there from here is never going to be a single simple solution but always many parts that will eventually be greater than the sum of those parts.
My vision of the future is that there will be a two-tier division between town and country and it will probably reflect the difference in wealth that already exists between many (but not all) rural dwellers and those who live in towns and cities. Having said that, there will be a levelling up in many ways – more bus routes in town and out; smaller electric busses, electric vehicles in town and even in the country, they could be used to get to the station or connect with a bus route; status will not be judged by the car you own, in fact, ownership might not be the prime model.
New Ways of Doing Things
In Liverpool they have a company operating a fleet of electric scooters that registered users can pick up and use wherever they find them and are charged by distance travelled. All GPS locatable, the company goes round at night and collects the scooters to take back to base for recharging. Imagine how this might work for Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles. For sure you couldn’t go around with a car transporter picking them up at night – but wait! There are other clever technological solutions available! Firstly, if you operate a reasonably expensive drone, the last thing you want is for it to run out of power and crash miles away from you – so they have a sensor such that when they only have just enough power to get back to you – that’s exactly what they do – turn tail and use GPS to automatically get themselves back to you. Combine that with driverless cars – and a company could automatically retrieve vehicles back to base and deliver them to customers’ doorsteps for whenever they have been ordered. One of the issues around driverless technology is that it is aiming to be used in current type motor cars up to and including a mix of lorries and cars on motorways – imagine how much safer it would be if the technology were used to control new, slower, lighter vehicles around town.
There are so many aspects of our necessary divorce from the motorcar as we now use it and just as the effects of the growth of the car brought incremental consequences, so the solution to how to adopt a new relationship must also be incremental and multi-faceted. Let me leave you with one last anecdote that shows the interconnected nature of things. There are fleets of electric buses already operating and some of them are contributing to solving one of the problems of the regulation of power supply – especially renewable power supply which can be occasionally irregular. When the busses return to their depots after taking commuters home, they arrive back at the very peak time when those same commuters are cooking their suppers. So the buses can return whatever charge is left in their batteries to the grid and then later in the night, when the TV goes off, the buses recharge their batteries ready for the morning. Building storage batteries to smooth out the supply and demand for energy from renewable sources is one of the major drawbacks and costs to switching to those power sources but in this case, we can see how buses, and perhaps even private electrical vehicles could become part of the battery solution – food for thought…
What can you do?
The most useful thing that an individual can do at this moment is to examine the situation both personally and in terms of the wider picture – take an inventory of your own circumstances and figure out whether you could change things in your own relationship with the car as things stand now. If not – then what would need to change to make it possible for you – petition for more bus routes; wait for electric vehicles to get smaller and more affordable; buy a bike and start to use it for more than just leisure or exercise; discover car-sharers in your area or advertise if you can’t find any. So much depends on attitudinal change that you might start discussions with other people to explore the problems and solutions – knowledge and insight are vital to change.
And please, if you have responses, questions or opinions on what I have said – post a comment and start the discussion…
Image generated with Midjourney AI by Andrew Wilson
I decided to make a Header Image (above) for this little series of posts and have retrofitted it to the two previous posts here and here. So I asked the Midjourney app on Discord, to depict a silver-skinned Android, firstly, standing at an easel painting, and then at a computer typing. I am fairly sure that the AI known as Midjourney had no sense of the irony of asking it to anthropomorphise an Android doing these activities, because current forms of AI are so far from having the sentience required to appreciate concepts as subtle as irony. Spoiler alert, I approached this evaluative exploration with certain preconceptions about the likely conclusion although I didn’t know for sure, how those conclusions might be reached because I didn’t know how AI’s work, in detail. What I am going to show you today is what I have learned, but I am also going to link you to a very erudite analysis of why we should not be worried about AI taking over the world – in a piece called “Why the AI Doomers Are Wrong“, Nafeez Ahmed explains why the direction of travel of AI development, simply can’t lead to a human-brain-like sentience. I will quote from his article later.
First of all, look at the left-hand side of the header picture, in particular, the easel. On close inspection, you can see that the easel is the wrong way round and that the painter/android, is standing behind the easel. Midjourney produces four images by default, in the remarkable time of about 60 seconds which is almost like magic – indeed, in 1962, Arthur C. Clarke, a science fiction writer, stated in his book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible” that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. So despite the apparent magic of creating these images so quickly, the AI has made a fundamental mistake that reveals that it doesn’t really understand what an easel is or how it should be used. Nafeez Ahmed is mostly talking about text generative interactions with AI – ChatGPT and the like, but what he says below, is equally applicable to images generated by AI…
The stunning capabilities of the new chatbots and their uncanny ability to engage in human-like conversations has sparked speculation about sentience. Yet there is zero tangible evidence of this beyond a sense of amazement. What many miss is that the amazing nature of these conversations is not a function of an internal subjective ‘understanding’ by an identifiable entity, but rather the operation of algorithms made-up of hundreds of billions of parameters trained on massive datasets of human text to predict words that should follow given strings of text. {…} This is not a breakthrough in intelligence, although it is, certainly, a breakthrough in being able to synthesise human responses to similar questions and thereby mimic patterns in human interaction. This model of AI, therefore, cannot, in itself, generate fundamentally new knowledge or understanding – let alone sentience.
Nafeez goes into great detail about how the research is headed in the wrong direction and indeed, how it is unlikely it is that it will ever succeed in equating to human sentience, so if you want to put your mind at rest about a Terminator-style future in which humans are subjugated by machines – nip on over and read the full article. Meanwhile I am going to show you some more examples of how Midjourney gets things “wrong” and how to get the “right” results and what that says about how useful such a programme can be.
You interact with the Midjourney app by sending it a message (just as if it was really an intelligent entity) containing a prompt, and once you receive your four images, you can choose one to enlarge, if you are satisfied with it, or run variations on one or all of them. Here is the prompt that produced the above set of images. “Silver android painting at an easel by Roy Lichtenstenstein” – the AI places most importance on the object at the beginning of the prompt, then on the activity described and lastly, it attempts to produce the images, in this case, in the style of the Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein – famous for painting s in the style of close-ups of comic book pictures. These close-ups show the dot screens that were used to shade the illustrations of the comic book plus the hard black outlining and Midjourney has picked up well on these style features, particularly the top right and bottom left pictures. The top-left shows a sculpture vaguely resembling an up-cycled easel made of silver and the bottom right shows a silver-skinned figure with dot-screen effect, holding a brush and painting a picture but with no easel. In the [op-right picture, the top of the easel is just showing in the bottom corner and the android “artist” is holding a small blank canvas in her hand and drawing on it. Having seen the header image at top, and these pictures were as near as I could get to what I wanted, from multiple attempts, you can see that what I wanted was an all-over silver-skinned android and in the images above, top-right has a human face although “her” body is robotic – perhaps cyborg is a better description, whilst the other pictures show a sculpture, a woman and a totally abstract figure. So I decided to change the prompts to “Robot” rather than “Android” which produced better results. The reason I had started with “Andriod” was because robots range from automatic hoovers that move around your rooms looking like little miniature flying saucers sucking up dirt to more anthropomorphic devices – which is what I wanted.
“standing silver robot painting at an easel by Roy Lichtenstein” produced(among others) the above image in which the robot, possibly standing, is grasping what looks like the top of an easel but the “painting” does not appear to be on the easel. So I tried “Robot standing painting at an easel” and got this rather cute robot who looks like he is sitting on an invisible chair – “Hey Midjourney” just because you don’t show the chair, doesn’t make it standing!” Notice that with the style reference to Roy Lictensten gone, this image is very different. I would like to show you more of the iterations but Midjourney froze and when I reinstalled it, it had lost the entire session of work – you just can’t get the staff…
Another thing that I have discovered in my experiments, is that both Midjourney and ChatGPT, like to add unspecified embellishments – remember in my first report, how ChatGPT found the correct explanation for the phrase “Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” but then added a totally made up explanation? Well Midjourney does the same thing too. Here is a picture of the railway viaduct at Knaresborough in West Yorkshire , an hours drive from where I live.
I wanted to see if Midjourney could produce a collage image using fragments of maps which it tried but didn’t really understand the concept – although I am not saying that it can’t, but at the very least, my prompt wasn’t sufficient (one of the oldest sayings amongst computer programmers is “Garbage in – garbage out!”) Here is Midjourneys best effort…
There are some map elements and the whole scene has been chopped up and rearranged but not in a way that makes sense – this one is closer to the real view…
But my first attempt, before I added the collage style, was simply to see how Midjourney would find and represent the viaduct and it generated the four images below. The top left image, Midjourney has added another railway running beneath the viaduct, likewise, lower-left it has added a canal and in the images on the right, Midjourney has transported us into a past sans Knaresborough and a post apocalyptic future where vegetation is growing over the viaduct.
Enough with all the pretty pictures – what does all this reveal about the way that the AI Midjourney works! Referring to the work – Erik J. Larson in his book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, Nafeez Ahmed cites a summary of the work by Ben Chugg, lead research analyst at Stanford University (Iknow – quotes within quotes) as follows:-
“Larson points out that current machine learning models are built on the principle of induction: inferring patterns from specific observations or, more generally, acquiring knowledge from experience. This partially explains the current focus on ‘big-data’ — the more observations, the better the model. We feed an algorithm thousands of labelled pictures of cats, or have it play millions of games of chess, and it correlates which relationships among the input result in the best prediction accuracy. Some models are faster than others, or more sophisticated in their pattern recognition, but at bottom they’re all doing the same thing: statistical generalization from observations. This inductive approach is useful for building tools for specific tasks on well-defined inputs; analyzing satellite imagery, recommending movies, and detecting cancerous cells, for example. But induction is incapable of the general-purpose knowledge creation exemplified by the human mind.”
Current AI has become proficient at both deductive and inductive inference, with the latter becoming a primary focus. Larson points out that human intelligence is based on a far more creative approach to generating knowledge called ‘abduction’. Abductive inference allows us to creatively select and test hypotheses, quickly eliminate the ones which are proven wrong, and create new ones as we go along before reaching a reliable conclusion. “We guess, out of a background of effectively infinite possibilities, which hypotheses seem likely or plausible,” writes Larson in The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. {…} And here is Larson’s killer diagnosis: We don’t have a good theory of how abductive inference works in the human mind, and we have no idea how to recreate abductive inference for AI: “We are unlikely to get innovation if we choose to ignore a core mystery rather than face it up,” he writes with reference to the mystery of human intelligence. Before we can generate genuine artificial intelligence that approaches human capabilities, we need a philosophical and scientific revolution that explains abductive inference. “As long as we keep relying on induction, AI programs will be forever prediction machines hopelessly limited by what data they are fed”, explains Chugg
To relate this back to my experiments with Midjourney, the AI could identify what an easel looked like and include it in an image but it didn’t really know what it was or how it was used. Easels are probably present in thousands of pictures of artist’s studios as well as adverts but I bet there isn’t a Painters 101 that “First you will need an easel and this is how you use it” because when a human artist goes into a studio and sees canvasses fixed into easels, even if he has never seen one before, he is there to paint canvasses and it is obvious what they are and what they are for. It might be obvious to a human being with our ability to use inference, deduction and abductive capabilities, but an AI might identify an easel, but without finding a clear description of the usage, it cannot fully fathom how to use it…
As for the the tendency to add extraneous details, well the algorithms that govern Generative AI’s, are designed to mimic human conversational style, so when it has found a relevant answer to the requested information or task, it looks to extend the conversation in what it has learned might possibly follow – it doesn’t know whether it is true or not, because that is way above it’s paygrade ( a metaphor which it probably wouldn’t understand either). This phenomena of AI’s making things up is called hallucination – a very anthropocentric term…
I will make one more report on my attempts to get exactly what I wanted from Midjourney and how I found a compromise to be able to work with the results…
