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Six Degrees of Separation – Debut Post…

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This was supposed to be an A to Z Roadtrip Review of LADY IN READ WRITES and I will get to that but on looking around her blog, I found this intriguing way of reviewing books and once I had sussed out that this was a regular challenge, I got back to the source of the Six Degrees of Separation Bookish Meme – here! And I had to take up Lady in Reads’ challenge and think of six linked books myself – so late it is, but here goes…

Now I haven’t read Hydra, by Adriane Howell, so I have had to go and look at the review on Amazon to find out what it is about and here is some of what it says – “Anja is a young, ambitious antiquarian, passionate for the clean and balanced lines of mid-century furniture. She is intent on classifying objects based on emotional response and when her career goes awry, Anja finds herself adrift. Like a close friend, she confesses her intimacies and rage to us with candour, tenderness, and humour. […] Hydra is a novel of dark suspense and mental disquiet, struck through with black humour., Adriane Howell beguilingly explores notions of moral culpability, revenge, memory, and narrative – all through the female lens of freedom and constraint. […] From the treacherous auction houses of Melbourne to the sun-struck islands of Greece, Hydra took me places I never expected to go.”

So a Greek island named after a tiny water creature named for the many-headed monster of Greek myth and the setting for a dark psychological drama…

This led me to This Thing of Darkness by Harry Thompson
Link:- A psychological drama about a man who probably was bi-polar.

This Thing of Darkness tells the story of the friendship between Captain Fitzroy (after whom the weather area is named) and the illustrious Charles Darwin and their voyage of discovery on HMS Beagle. Fitzroy had hoped that the trainee Parson and amateur naturalist appointed to the voyage, would scotch the ideas gaining traction from geology, that the story of the Earth was not as written in the bible but rather that written in the fossil record. Alas, Darwin formulated the bones of his Theory of Natural Selection after their voyage to the Galapagos Islands but it is thought that it was partly out of respect for his friend Fitzroy, that he held off publishing his theory until forced to by the possibility of rival scientists publishing ahead of him. In the course of the voyage of the Beagle, it becomes clear that Fitzroy was probably suffering from what we today would diagnose as Bi-polar disorder.

This led me to Ammonite by Nicola Griffith
The link:- Fossils

Four out of my six linked books are or contain elements of science-fiction and those four are some of my favourite books ever – not that I only read that genre only, any more than Nicola Griffith only writes sci-fi, but Ammonite was, brilliantly, her first novel. set on a planet where a virus kills all men and the indigenous women have found a way to reproduce without the opposite sex. The titular ammonite plays a very small part, but a link is a link…

This led me to The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula le Guin
Link:- A planet of humankind with a unique form of sexuality…

Ursuala le Guin is perhaps the pre-eminent female writer of science-fiction and it is hard to imagine that her sex was not a factor in writing The Left Hand of Darkness. In a universe where a long vanished race have applied pan-spermia to many planets, seeding each with variations on the human theme – this planet has a people who only come into their sexual phase at a certain time of the month. Ursula le Guin explores the implications of such a thought experiment, no monogamous birth couples, no rape, sex as a cloistered activity etc. There is much more to the book, friendship, diplomacy, political intrigue, but the sexuality was the link both to and from…

This led me to Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Link:- A sex changing nobleman whose lives span 300 years.

I have not read Orlando myself, but have heard it dramatised and so it is on my Tsundoku list… It is a satirical fiction dedicated to Virginia Woolf’s lover, and author – Vita Sackville-West and who had a mutual fascination with the more literary author that was Virgina – the latter has made the literary grade whilst the work of Vita has sunk into comparative obscurity. However she was the inspiration for Orlando and so has achieved a form of immortality…

This led me to the breakthrough work of one of my favourite authors – Kurt Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse Five
Link:- a hero who has become, in the author’s words – unstuck in time.

Kurt Vonnegut – an American of German origin, joined up to fight the Germans in World War 2, was captured by the Germans, locked up with his work party on the outskirts of Dreden on the night of the fire-bombing of Dresden in which he nearly lost his life to being bombed by his Allies. This had a profound effect on Vonnegut and although this was not his first book, when Slaughtrehouse Five was finally birthed, it was Vonnegut’s breakthrough masterpiece. Vonnegut projects his PTSD onto his character Billy Pilgrim who flashes back and forth on his time-line…

This lead to The Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
Link:- A nested series of stories going from the past to the future and back

This highly successful book and the probably more widely viewed film that was made of it, shows how what can work in a novel may need to be changed in a movie. The Cloud Atlas starts in the 18th century, tells half a story – moves on in time, tells half of another story and carries on into a post-apocalyptic future which is somehow linked to each of the stories. I then concludes each story working backwards in time. The movie, and we tend to think, mistakenly, of flashbacks (and flashes forward) to be a movie invention, and The Cloud Atlas darts unforgivingly between the various strands of the story and I found, that even having read the book previously, it has taken several viewings to grasp all the connections which were amplified by the visual rendering of the book. Which is best? Read then watch and weigh in for yourselves…

Which brings us full circle, because The Cloud Atlas (book) begins on a beach like the setting for Hydra and the movie ends on another beach in another galaxy far, far away and like all the books mentioned, they all take the reader on a journey which cannot leave the reader unmoved or unchanged…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative Artificial Intelligence Number Three

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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 Ahmed

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.

https://www.visitharrogate.co.uk/explore/knaresborough

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.”

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-false-philosophy-plaguing-ai-bdcfd4872c45

Nafeez goes on:-

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

https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/why-the-ai-doomers-are-wrong?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

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…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative Artificial Intelligence, Number Two…

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ChatGPT is not the only flavour…

ChatGPT is the AI offering from OpenAI and is probably the most talked about Bot since its launch last year – however it is not the only one so today I am going to compare it with Writesonic and see how they handle a piece of promotional writing. I still work 2.5 days as a manager at a gelato and pudding factory – sounds great unless you are diabetic like me. Anyway, we are trialling some new gelato flavours and I thought it a good moment to see how an AI generative writer might handle promoting this.

ChatGPT

Having no idea what might emerge, I started by putting a very simple prompt in “Promote a new gelato flavour – Caramel Popcorn Gelato” and this is what emerged a minute or so later.

“Introducing the newest addition to the world of gelato: Caramel Popcorn Gelato! This delectable treat is the perfect blend of sweet and savoury, with creamy caramel gelato swirled with crunchy popcorn pieces.
One spoonful of this delicious gelato and you’ll be transported to your favourite movie theatre, with the aroma of freshly popped popcorn and the indulgent taste of caramel. The creamy texture of the gelato perfectly complements the crispy texture of the popcorn, making for a truly delightful dessert experience.
Whether you’re looking for a sweet treat to enjoy on a warm summer day or a cosy dessert for a movie night in, Caramel Popcorn Gelato is sure to satisfy your cravings. So go ahead and indulge in this delicious new flavour – you won’t be disappointed!”

I have changed the spelling of Flavor to Flavour but otherwise, this is straight from the horse’s mouth and for so little guidance, is a pretty remarkable effort in just 128 words. As a marketing piece it leads straight to the movie/popcorn evocation as well as describing the mouthfeel and flavour.

Writesonic

The process of specifying and even joining the bot service was much more complicated – it assumed that I was a business user and gave me 10,00 free words to trial the product. Then it asked for a Subject for the piece and offered to search for Keywords if I did not supply them, which I did – the name of the flavour, it asked d what sort of Tone the piece should have of which I picked Excited, and it then generated Ideas for the article followed by a default three Outlines for an Article. I could have had more outlines but reading through the three that was quite sufficient and I then had a chance to add or remove the ten or so points that the article would consist of and I narrowed it down to five points – the rest would be useful further along in the promotion. Finally I pressed Generate and in short order got my article. I had tried to indicate a length of 130 words to be compatible with ChatGPT but Writesonic did its own thing – 465 words which together with the preliminary stages, reduced my 10,000 words to 9,271. Here it is, complete with photo and in the style of a blog post article:

A Delicious Breakthrough: New Caramel Popcorn Flavour Gelato

This was the image that Writesonic sourced from the internet which it merely credited to Unsplash – I have reverse-searched and added the full credit link –
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

As a gelato lover, I’m always on the lookout for exciting and unique flavours to try. So, when I heard about the new caramel popcorn flavour gelato, I couldn’t wait to give it a taste. As soon as I took my first spoonful, I knew that this flavour was going to be a game-changer. In this blog post, I’m going to share my thoughts on this delicious breakthrough.

The Inspiration Behind the Creation of the Flavour

What inspired the gelato makers to create a caramel popcorn flavour? The answer is simple: the love of movies. Think about it, what’s a movie without a tub of popcorn? And what’s better than caramel popcorn? That’s right, a caramel popcorn flavour gelato!

The gelato makers wanted to create a flavour that would bring the movie theatre experience to your taste buds. They experimented with different combinations of caramel and popcorn, trying to find the perfect balance. They wanted to create a flavour that was sweet and buttery, with a hint of saltiness. After many attempts, they finally found the perfect recipe.

How to Pair the Caramel Popcorn Flavour Gelato

Now that we know the story behind the creation of the flavour, let’s talk about how to pair it. The caramel popcorn flavour gelato is perfect for those who love sweet and salty combinations. It’s a great flavour to enjoy on its own, but it can also be paired with other flavours to create a delicious dessert.

One of my favourite ways to enjoy the caramel popcorn flavour gelato is to pair it with a chocolate flavour. The richness of the chocolate complements the sweetness of the caramel, while the saltiness of the popcorn adds a nice contrast. Another great pairing is with a fruit flavour, such as raspberry or strawberry. The tartness of the fruit provides a nice balance to the sweetness of the caramel popcorn.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts on the New Flavour

In conclusion, the new caramel popcorn flavour gelato is a delicious breakthrough that’s perfect for movie lovers and gelato enthusiasts alike. The gelato makers behind this flavour deserve a round of applause for their creativity and dedication to bringing new and exciting flavours to the table.

If you haven’t tried the caramel popcorn flavour gelato yet, I highly recommend giving it a taste. It’s a flavour that will take your taste buds on a journey and leave you wanting more. So, go ahead and indulge in this sweet and salty treat – you won’t regret it!

CTA: Head to your nearest gelato shop and try the new caramel popcorn flavour gelato today!

Which was best?

ChatGPT did an amazing job for such a skinny prompt, but I can see that Writesonic would deliver a much more refined article with a lot more options to craft the result, which was fully SEO optimised, for those of you with a nerdy disposition.

A Midjourney image generated by the prompt –
“salted caramel popcorn flavour gelato in the style of a Baskin-Robbins ad“

To conclude, I am going to show you another gorgeous image generated by Midjourney AI bot from the prompt “Wild Rose and Lonicera in the style of Tenniel –version 5 –tile”…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative Artificial Intelligence, Number One…

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AI or Artificial Intelligence, is a hot topic at present with governments weighing up how to invest in the sector, insiders from the industry warning of the potential dangers and the media stoking fears from job losses to the eradication of the human race. During the recent A to Z Challenge 2023, I was highly impressed by the images selected by Misky in her blog IT’S STILL LIFE – A.I. ART & POETRY and decided to investigate the whole subject of AI for myself. I also wanted to know about Generative Text AI because my work demands various forms of word creation and I had heard that this might be one of the first areas to suffer job losses to AI.

This tile design was designed by Midjourney 5 with a prompt of no more than Passion Flower –tile. It lines up perfectly on every edge, a task which is difficult to do by hand…
Using a third-party software, you can turn Midjourney’s tile into wallpaper and appreciate the seamless matching of edges.

But first, a little thought about where I understand us to be right now. There is Soft AI (think Alexa) and then there is the dreaded Hard AI (think Terminator). Soft AI is already in use all around us, Grammarly, Predictive Text on your smartphone, Alexa, Google and other search engines but the reason people are not running around screaming “The terminators are coming!” as a result of all this Soft AI action, is because the intelligence quotient of this sort of AI is pretty low. For example, say to your “smart” speaker Alexa “Alexa! Tell me a joke!” and Alexa will oblige with a joke of variable humour, but then say “Alexa! Tell me another!” and Alexa will not know what you want – unless you specify “joke” in which case you could leave the “another” out since it is irrelevant to Alexa that she has just told you a joke. This means that Alexa is hardly conducting a conversation. On the other hand, she can sort through literally millions of bits of data to find and play you the song you want to hear. So this sort of AI is doing exactly what we want -conducting the repetitive, boring, difficult (because of the magnitude of data) tasks which we none of us really enjoy doing, or given the scale of data today, could even do! I was reading how when the sea-change brought about in Accountancy when computers could sit on every desk and more particularly, when those computers could run spreadsheets, there were fears of mass redundancies in accounting firms. And so there were at the clerk level of the business, but on the other hand, amongst the higher level accountants, jobs boomed like never before, because the things they could do with spreadsheets, the new things they could offer their clients had been undreamable before – so let us take the tales of mass unemployment with a pinch of salt – after all, I wouldn’t mind betting that some of the accounting clerks were able to upgrade their skills and move up the ladder with the help of a computer…

Above is an example of a tricky task for any graphic designer to do manually – to design a seamless tile repeat and I will come back to this particular task in the future, but to say that this task was accomplished in under sixty seconds, is for now simply amazing!

Text AI

So first of all, I want to look at my first encounter with ChatGPT which was developed by OpenAI and which they describe as a Large Language Model Generative pre-trained transformer Chatbot. What that means is that an AI computer programme has been fed a huge amount of written material, novels, adverts, and non-fiction from the World Wide Web and not only does the AI have access to all this material, but it can stitch information together according to very clever algorithms to write “original” material. So I thought I would test it out by asking it to write a piece about one of the more colourful phrases from my recent A to Z Challenge – phrases we mostly know the meaning of but have forgotten the origins of. First, here is my explanation:

“Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – you may be beginning to see the “lost in translation” aspect of sayings overheard from sailors by landsmen in which case, you will not be surprised to learn that this expression has nothing to do with statues of simians cast in brass losing their genitalia!

A “monkey” on a wooden ship, especially a warship, was a (usually) wooden tray with rounded depressions in which cannon balls were stacked in preparation for the battle – the last thing you wanted was heavy cannon balls rolling around the deck of a pitching deck – let alone a “loose cannon” – so cannons were secured (against recoil on firing) by strong ropes and cannon balls were kept on a monkey. I said that monkeys were usually made of wood, but admirals or very lucky captains, who had made a lot of money from their share of “prizes” (captured ships, evaluated and paid for by the Navy) – were allowed to prettify their ships with gold leaf, dress their crews in custom, fancy uniforms, and purchase brass monkeys rather than the standard issue wooden ones. Now here’s the thing, a monkey was carefully designed so that you could pile the cannon balls up in a pyramid to maximise your supply of cannon balls in as small a space as possible but the thermal coefficient of expansion of brass (the monkey) and iron (the cannon balls) is different – the brass monkey shrinks more than iron in very cold conditions. Now, the carefully spaced second and subsequent layers of the pyramid are too big for their positions and can roll off the monkey hence “Cold Enough to Freeze the Balls Off a Brass Monkey!” – Simples! Not!

Now here is ChatGPT’s first attempt:
“The expression “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” is a well-known phrase that means that it is extremely cold outside. Although it is a common phrase, its origin and accuracy are often disputed.
One theory suggests that the phrase originates from the age of sailing ships when cannonballs were stored on the deck of the ship in a brass frame called a “monkey.” The frame consisted of several round holes where the cannonballs were stacked. During cold weather, the brass frame would contract more quickly than the iron cannonballs, causing them to fall out of the frame. Hence, the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”
However, there is little historical evidence to support this theory. The phrase “brass monkey” itself is not found in any nautical dictionaries or records, and the idea that brass contracts more quickly than iron is also questionable.
Another theory is that the phrase originated from a Victorian-era pub game called “brass monkey,” which involved placing brass balls on a tray and attempting to knock them off with a ball bearing. The game was typically played in cold weather, and if the temperature dropped low enough, the brass balls could freeze to the tray, making it impossible to play. Hence, the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” may have originated from this game.
However, like the previous theory, there is little concrete evidence to support this theory.
Overall, the origin of the phrase “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” remains uncertain. It is likely that the phrase has evolved over time, and its origins may be lost to history.”

So what do we think of this? Well firstly, the “the idea that brass contracts more quickly than iron is also questionable ” is simply not true – science tells us that brass both expands and contracts more than iron – so there is a lie right there! Secondly, Chat GPT says that there is no evidence of the phrase in “nautical dictionaries or records. Whether or not such dictionaries even exist, there are plenty of references to this particular phrase and it’s origin in many places on the web and in literature – I first heard of it in the books of Patrick O’Brien who spent much of his life carrying out research for his books in the Admiralty records and I would trust him implicitly. You have to find as many references as you can when researching a subject like this. There are, of course, always people who will dispute the origins of various phrases and so perhaps ChatGPT gave undue credence to these doubters. Still, then ChatGPT goes even further and completely fabricates an alternative theory! The idea of a “Victorian -era pub game called ‘brass monkey’…'” does not show up in any search of the internet whatsoever, so ChatGPT has not only dissed the correct explanation, but suggested a completely fictitious alternative – all done with a convincingly authoritative tone. Luckily, there is a Regenerate button and on dressing this, without any refining the prompt or critiquing the first result, ChatGPT came clean and produced a correct version of the explanation:
“The expression “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” is a colloquial phrase used to describe extremely cold weather.
There are a few different theories about the origin of this expression, but the most widely accepted one is that it comes from the era of sailing ships.
In the days of sail, cannons were an important part of a ship’s armament. The cannonballs were made of iron and were stored on deck in piles or pyramids. To prevent them from rolling around in rough seas, the cannonballs were often stacked on a flat brass plate called a monkey.
When the temperature dropped below freezing, the brass monkey would contract more than the iron cannonballs, causing them to fall off. Hence, it was said to be “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.”
However, it’s worth noting that there is no definitive proof for this theory, and other explanations have been proposed as well. Nonetheless, the phrase has become a part of English language and culture, and it is still used today to describe extremely cold weather.”

The second iteration is both factually more correct and more concise, but for a first encounter with ChatGPT to throw up such a blatant fabrication is worrying. It suggests that however miraculous the task of researching and collating this story might be, it definitely needs checking by a human being because otherwise, another false news item might find its way onto the Internet and go echoing around and around… Just such a story of defamation by a ChatGPT “news” story, happened to an Australian Mayor who rather than being portrayed as the whistleblower he actually was, he was reported to have gone to jail for corruption – he is suing ChatGPT‘s developers, OpenAI.

Not that I am fishing for compliments but what do you think of my explanation of the phrase compared to ChatGPT’s? After all, you might think I was too verbose and ChatGPT more concise…

Image AI

So far, I have only tried out the Midjourney bot (short for Robot, which I discussed in my “R” post in April) but I will be trying and comparing them and reporting back to you Dear Reader, but for now, I just want to share some images that I have created which were successful, although sometimes after several attempts to refine the prompts – more of that next time…

Each submission or message to the Midjourney Bot, produces not one, but four variations for you to choose from. You may then ask for an enlargement of one (see below) or to take one as a starting point for variation and another four will be developed. The prompt for this group was “flower_fairies_playing_amongst_blackberry_stems_and_fruit”
Here is the enlargement of the top left image.

I then decided to turn this into a tiled image (below).

The prompt for this image was “Village_beside_lake_style_of_Charles_Rennie_Mackintosh_pallette knife_oil_painting. I think the syntax should have been “in the style of” so I’m not sure that this owes much to Mackintosh but it is great – I think…

So we (if you want to come along with me) are on our way to investigating AI – so far Text AI dodgy, and ImageAI – amazing!

Roadtrip Review No.1

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This is a review of blogs who participated in the A to Z Challenge 2023 starting with those who were frequent flyers in my Comments…

Misky over on IT’S STILL LIFE, has been posting poems accompanied by AI-generated images for the A to Z. Not only has she inspired me in my return to poetry writing, but since AI is a hot topic now, the incredible images in her posts have caused me to begin my own evaluative exploration of AI – and may I say how generous Misky has been in giving me pointers as to where to begin! Having tried creating some pictures myself, using the Midjourney bot on Discord, I still cannot begin to imagine how the AI creates the pictures. I can however, imagine the processes of Misky, the poet and I urge you to go and read and look… I should add that Misky is a multiple poster, she offers a Twiglet Writing Prompt as well as participating in many other peoples’ prompt series.

An image generated by Midjourney to the prompt “a community of bloggers around the world sharing their post“

D B McNichol is a seriously productive writer of at least 32 novels on Goodreads alone and whose perspicacity was demonstrated by the fact that she gave up the whole of April to the A to Z Challenge! Having pre-prepared all of her posts in advance, she was then free to spend at least four hours a day reading other people’s blogs 35-40 0f them, and commenting on them! Her own posts were lists of Small Delights, Simple Pleasures and Significant Pleasures which challenged the reader to consider and add their own favourites. Donna had retired from a career in IT before she even started writing books and if the effort she has demonstrated on the A to Z is anything to go by, it’s no wonder she has become a successful author – Kudos!

Deborah Weber is an old friend from the A to Z Challenge and each year she has written compelling Abercadariums of great subjects – and this year she wrote from a list of obscure colour names. Not only were the posts fascinating in themselves, but Deborah wrote in a free-association way (which she talks about in her Reflections post) rather than the more usual linear delivery. To my mind, this is not only the most preferable way of writing or talking (see my post on Alastair Cooke) but the essence of why we read blogs. A blog is not a textbook and Deborah with her free association gets my vote every time! I should say that as a sometime signwriter, specialist decorator and artist, Colours are right up my street anyway…

Sadje in her Keep it Alive blog, is another multiple-strand post-er of ideas and challenges, and although her domain name says “life after 50 for women” – her challenges and advice as well as her readers, are for and of both sexes. You only have to look at her use of Categories in the banner at the top of her site to see the variety of subjects tackled by Sadje… For her theme this year, Sadje posed a series of (challenging) questions designed to stimulate her readers to do more with mind, body and spirit – use it or lose it might be her motto…

Josna in Tell me Another (story) does just that – she shares stories about a recent visit home to India from the States where she now lives. Visits home are always a poignant mix of reminiscence and comparison with the person we are now and the place where we now reside and Josna does not disappoint. You will be transported to the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of Josna’s India as well as her more personal thoughts…

Lady Lee Manilla has been someone who once followed, has been the most prodigious presence in my Jetpack (WordPress) feed! Another multiple post-er, every day, Lady Lee has shared her poems, her photos and her life with her 1,438 followers of whom I am obviously just a recent addition! Her enthusiasm for poetry – her own and others – and the warmth of her sharing, have endeared Lady Lee to me…

I will be continuing these reviews because there are many left to describe but I have been working for three hours now and my stomach is demanding breakfast…

Another iteration (you always get four) from Midjourney to the prompt “a community of bloggers around the world sharing their post” – weird and wonderful…

Xmas Tree, Extras, EXpelliarmus – Made up languages…

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The A to X Challenge is a form of Abercadarium and it is a testament to the imagination of the many bloggers who participate, that they manage to find twenty-six words each year, with which to furnish their blogs. Yet every year, depending on the theme, each blogger will struggle to fulfil certain letters but if there is one letter of the alphabet which almost always challenges – it is X… So I shall not be surprised to see a bit of cheating nor feel guilty to use the silent E in EX to resolve this dilemma for myself – after all, I am not just searching for a word, but for a whole phrase – and one that we know the meaning of but have forgotten the origin of!

But first, with no cheating, The Xmas Tree, whilst not quite a phrase, is something whose origins have certainly been forgotten – perhaps for good reason… Christmas, Xmas, and Yule-tide is the second most important festival in the Christian calendar – the birth of Christ coming second after the Easter festival which “celebrates” his death. The death of Christ and the symbolic meaning of it, is arguably the reason why the spread of Christianity has been so successful – God first gave, then sacrificed His only son for the sake of sinful mankind – it’s a powerful story but equally important in the acceptance of Christianity, has been its strategy of incorporating local, existing festivals wherever it has gone, and one of the first examples of this is Rome and the Romans who adopted Christianity under Emperor Constantine in an “if you can’t beat them join them” way. One of the Roman festivals which came near enough he date (somewhat arbitrarily fixed) on which Christians celebrated the birth of Christ, was the carrying of a Pine log through the streets to the Temple of Magna Mater ( Big Momma?) in memory of the goddess’ consort Attis. In the same way that Christianity subsumed other religious traditions, the worship of Magna Mater came to Rome from Greece and in turn, probably, from Phrygia.

Relief of an Archigallus making sacrifices to Cybele and Attis, Museo Archeologico Ostiense, Ostia Antica

The Goddess Cybele, is said to have found the infant Attis, in a basket in a reed bed (similar to the discovery of Moses) and raised him like a mother, to be her consort and priest for which he made a vow of chastity, to look at no other female than Cybele. He broke this vow with a nymph making Cybele so angry that she cast Attis out and mortified, he committed suicide by castration, bleeding out under a pine tree and being transformed into one himself. Cybele now relented her anger and brought Attis back to life and, having learned his lesson, Attis remained in faithful service to her (and who wouldn’t!).

A cult of Galli, meaning half-men, grew up around Attis in which priests ritually, and ecstatically castrated themselves and there is some suggestion that this was a trans-gender cult. This did not go down well with the Romans for whom castration, rather sensibly, was illegal. The logs carried through the streets by the Romans were adorned with an image of Attis dressed in women’s clothes – could this be the origin of the “fairy” atop the later Christmas tree? The Arbor Festival of which the Pine Log carrying was part, took place in March and is part of the coming of spring since Cybele was seen as the goddess of fertility and rebirth (and Attis’s resurrection) but may have been subsumed by Christianity as part of the turn of the year timing of Christmas.

Almost from the beginning of Christianity, the celebration of Christmas was criticised for its materialism and the more austere the variant of Christianity, the more it was criticised although it is said that Martin Luther, the reforming founder of Protestantism, was the first to bring a Christmas tree indoors and adorn it with candles after walking at night under a starry studded sky – certainly the tradition of the Xmas tree grew until its Victorian apogee with candles, baubles, tinsel and presents stashed beneath it…

The tradition of lighting a Christmas tree has been widespread in Britain since the Victorian era

Extras – here are a couple of phrases that I thought of too late for the date of posting their letter! Booting up (your computer) goes back to the 19th-century book “The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen” by Rudolf Erich Raspe based loosely on a real explorer renowned for his telling of tall tales (hence Munchausen Syndrome). In one story he claimed to have climbed to the moon by pulling first on one boot bootstrap, raising his foot, and then on the other. Computers use a tiny operating system called the BIOS to start the underlying machine code operating system DOS, which finally starts your main operating system, say Windows or Linux – hence bootstrapping – now abbreviated to booting up!

Theatrical release poster by Lucinda Cowell for Terry Gilliams film…

Giving free rein to something – obvious when you think about it but most people are so far removed from the age of horses as a means of transport, that we may have forgotten that the reins are the steering wheel of a horse and so when you give a horse free reign, you are allowing it to find and pick it’s own way – perhaps because the ground is difficult and the horse knows best where to place its feet…

EXpelliarmus is the “Disarming Spell” from Harry Potter and whilst it is necessary to invent some Latin-sounding names for spells in such a book, some authors go as far as to invent whole languages for their books – I am thinking of J R Tolkien in particular where such languages reside in Appendices to his books. Of course, Tolkien was a Professor of Middle English at Oxford so he certainly had the skill to make such inventions but did they add anything to the books? Well, there are phrases spoken by say the Elves followed, mercifully, by the translation, but was it necessary to invent the whole language? I think not and I always skipped over those appendices. And what about those authors who put foreign language phrases and don’t follow them with the translation – how elitist is that!!! Of course, there are a few nerds who have fleshed out and talk Klingon (StarTrek) to each other at nerd fests and who knows – maybe there are would-be Elves whispering sibilantly to each other in Tolkien’s elvish tongue. But I think of the dwarves, elves, hobbits and orcs as archetypes of human nature rather than literal races who require a language inventing for them. Lots of science fiction and other fiction manage to put contemporary language into the mouths of their characters to perfectly good effect for the reason that the books are addressing a modern audience. Anyway, that’s my little rant over…

The Cant languages we have been showcasing from the Wikipedia article on that subject, are, on the other hand, perfectly justified because they are to defend one group from the eavesdropping of another and today we have just one:

Xíriga, from Asturias, Spain

W – Wednesday, Friday etc.- Linguistic hangovers – Walk the Chalk, Winging it –Whistlestop Tour…

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Wednesday, Friday etc. are linguistic reminders of Britains many waves of invaders leading to the mongrel people and mongrel language of which we are so proud (whilst still using the dog-whistle of Immigration to try and rouse the  right to support the current government).

Wednesday come from Wotan’s Day (Head Honcho of the Norse Gods who was brought to us by the Vikings), Thursday – Thor’s Day and Friday (now reduced or is it elevated to a celluloid Superhero), Friday is for the Goddess Freia. Saturday is for the Roman god Saturn ( they too invaded Britain!). Sunday is for the Sun and Monday for the Moon which are fairly obvious, but Tuesday is supposed to be referencing the Roman God and planet Mars and the derivation of Tuesday from Mars is less obvious…

To “Walk the Chalk” means to behave according to the rules and comes from the sobriety test whereby a policeman requires someone suspected of being drunk, to walk a straight line.

Officer Rueben Morales, Universal City Police Department helps Mark Tharp walk a straight line while wearing fatal vision goggles June 4, 2014 during the Critical Days of Summer event at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph. These goggles give the individual a view of how things are seen after alcohol consumption. (U.S. Air Force photo by Joel Martinez)

Winging it – this is the expression I always used used to use for “making it up as you go along” UNTIL my first A to Z  Challenge in 2023 when I picked up an alternative – Pantsing It! I have used it ever since! This year I have managed to stay ahead of the game – so far… But the origin of the expression “Winging it”, comes from the Wing-walkers – those derring-do entertainers who performed stunts on the top wing of biplanes in the 1920s and 30s – imagine the Risk Assessments if you tried to do that today…

www.rarehistoricalphotos.com

A Whistlestop Tour is an American expression where many small towns were connected by rail before even road – may even have come into being because of the building of the railways. They were however, too small to have a scheduled halt and only stopped if they were requested to by a signal and they blew their whistle to announce their impending arrival and let potential passengers to get to the station – hence Whistlestop. Campaigning Politicians in America, often travelled around by train and at tiny whistlestop towns, would not even alight from the train but instead, make their speech from the balcony which train carriages had in those days – a Whistlestop Tour…

By Unknown author or not provided – U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16532272

There is no Cant language beginning with W from the Wikipedia article…

V – V-sign/ Victory V

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Always a difficult letter “V” plus at this stage in the A to Z I am only 2 posts away from “pantsing it” so forgive me if this post is a little briefer than normal…

Winston Churchill giving his Victory V sign
English singer-songwriter and entertainer Robbie Williams does the reversed V sign at a paparazzo photographer in London in 2000

Winston Churchill’s iconic V-sign – meaning V for Victory, is a sanitised version of the V-sign going back to the Battle of Agincourt and the days of the great English Long Bow-men. So effective were these bowmen both in terms of accuracy and power – being able to rain down armour-piercing arrows on the enemy – so the French threatened that if they caught the English bowmen, they would cut off their first two fingers – the ones used to draw their bow and so, as two lines of soldiers faced each other across no-mans-land, the English bowmen would wave their first and second fingers in a V-sign to show that they were still armed (or fingered) and dangerous. The true V-sign is delivered by raising your forearm smartly to the vertical, fingers spread, brandishing a V whereas Winston Churchill held up his Victory V palm forward in a respectable but recognizable reference to the classic gesture.

The Cant Language beginning with V from the Wikipedia article is:

U – Under the Weather, – Upper case / Lower case, – Umble pie…

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Under the weather – yet another sailor’s term! You have to remember that in the days of wooden sailing ships, the crew were mostly barefoot (which is why the deck had to be sanded free of splinters every day) and except in voyages to regions of extreme cold, or during storms when they had some kind of waterproof outfit,  they were not very well dressed either. On the plus side, once they had left the land, they were free of infectious diseases like colds and flu – what they picked up whilst in port is another matter. However, sailors did get sick and they usually got sent to recuperate below deck – literally, under the weather…

Woodletter for poster printing

Upper case / Lower case  – I began a career in graphics (among other things) at school where I joined the printing society – who printed the programmes for plays and concerts as well as posters using the large woodblock type that is now mostly seen in antique shops. It has been a strand in my career ever since and I have just made my first foray into AI – an evaluative exploration which I will be continuing once the madness of April A to Z is over. We printed with lead type which was kept in those compartmented drawers which are also beloved of antique shops and turned into glass-fronted showcases for knick-knacks. The capital letters were kept in one drawer marked Upper Case whilst the Lower Case letters were in the drawer beneath – simples!

Umble Pie

Lest you think I have made a spelling mistake and missed off the “H” or am affecting a Cockney accent and dropping the “H”, Umble pie, is a pie made from Umbles which include very cheap cuts of meat and in particular – offal – heart, liver, kidneys, tripe, sweetmeats, lungs and thoroughly washed intestines. Such a pie is the food is, of course, the food of the poor who may well also be humble. The word humble comes from the Latin humilis meaning lowly, close to the earth. The two words – humble, and umble – are conflated in the expression “He was made to eat (h)umble pie.” He was humbled and forced to admit the error of his ways. I blame the confusion between humble and umble fairly and squarely on that obsequious creation of Charles Dickens in David Copperfield – “Uriah Heep” – an inveterate dropper of “h’s” whose catchphrase was “I’m ever so umble…”

Here is a recipe for Umble Pie…

There are no Cant languages beginning with U from the Wikipedia article today.

T – Three Sheets to the Wind, Truffle out, Tarnation, Tits up – break a leg. On Tenterhooks…

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Another sailing term, but this time to do with small boat sailing (although big sailing ships might well have sailed tenders). The sheets mean the ropes which are attached to the sails, so in a sailing dinghy that means two ropes, one each port and starboard and the same for the mainsail. Now you want to coil up the sheets which are not actually in use at any moment so that they don’t get tangled up with anything and are ready for the next time you change course and swap the sails from one side to the other. So if you are “Three Sheets to the Wind”, then you are hardly in control of your sailing craft – sheets blowing free bar one only a drunken sailor would be so sloppy – so three sheets to the wind means drunk, out of control…

Truffle Out refers to the way truffles – the underground fruiting bodies of the truffle fungus – are located by either a Truffle Hound or perhaps a Truffle Pig – animals which are trained to locate these expensive delicacies – of course, they are rewarded with a small portion of their finds to keep them keen… In current usage, it reflects a slightly gentle, indulgent form of searching for something, not the logic of Sherlock Holmes or the sharp no-nonsense of Philip Marlowe but possibly Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot…

What is a Truffle Pig?

Tarnation is the outlier of a group of religious swear words that we shall return to in “Z” but here we have, according to the Online Etymological Dictionary, “1784, American English alteration of darnation (itself a euphemism for damnation), influenced by tarnal (1790), a mild profanity, clipped from the phrase by the Eternal (God)” Etymology is a fancy word for what this blog has been attempting to do this year – to truffle out the meaning and origin of words and phrases…

“Tits up!” is a delightful phrase which my partner and I grew to love from binge-watching “The Marvellous Mrs Maisel” a fictional, Jewish, New York, wise-cracking comedienne. She might have been fictional but several of the characters in the drama were real – Lenny Bruce for one and Miriam Maisel’s agent Susie Myerson, who specialised in female clients and always sent Miriam onstage with a robust admonition of “Tits up!” This is used as an expression for things going wrong and taps into the superstitious world of the stage in which “Break a leg!” serves the same purpose – the ritual wishing of the worst that might happen to someone wards off the possibility of it actually happening. There was me thinking for years that if you slipped backwards on a banana skin – a Pratfall – you would land tits up…

On Tenterhooks refers to the hooks that line the sides of a tenter, or frame for stretching fabric. Wet fabric is stretched on the tenter and secured by the hooks with even tension and hopefully, all wrinkles will be stretched flat as the fabric dries. Of course, that means waiting to see whether you have pulled the fabric taut enough to get rid of the wrinkles, else you have to start again and that is how it has come to mean waiting on some desired outcome with trepidation. I always thought the expression was referring to the meat hooks on which gangsters like to hang those from whom they are trying to extract information (surely a perilous position in which to wonder about the outcome) – turns out those are just meat hooks…

The Cant languages beginning with T from the Wikipedia article are:

  • Thieves’ cant (or peddler’s French, or St Giles’ Greek), from the United Kingdom
  • Tōgo, from Japan (a back slang)
  • Totoiana, from Romania
  • Tsotsitaal, from South Africa
  • Tutnese, from the United States