Pun Salad

Just a Ramireztoon today. (I'm not sure whether I should add "sorry" to that.)

Geeky explanation, not that it should matter to you: One of Google's long-promised/threatened "upgrades" to Chrome has nuked a major chunk of my blogging infrastructure. Specifically, the wonderful old chromix-too browser extension that allowed me to access some bits of Chrome's API from the Linux shell has been permanently banned.

I knew it was coming, but I procrastinated about coming up with a fix. Chromix-too's author is a very nice guy, but is uninterested in maintaining it. And it's in Javascript, with lots of coding idioms I find incomprehensible.

Still, I think I almost have it. So maybe we'll be back to normal… tomorrow? Not promising that.

Thomas Szasz is a lot of fun to read. This book is from 1996, and centers around—see the title—the notion of "mind". Szasz argues it is a mistake (although a common one) to use that word as a noun. It should be used solely as a verb. As in: "Mind your own businesss". "Minding" is an activity, your self-communication to make decisions and guide actions.

Szasz is especially contemptuous of determinists who equate the "mind" with one's brain, and deniers of "free will". I'm on his side here.

One advantage of reading older books: you get to read how confident predictions made decades ago turned out. For example, on pp. 77-8, Szasz quotes from a 1995 Time article, still online: "Glimpses of the Mind". Why, science is on the verge of letting us "clarify the mysteries of consciousness but also to understand and treat such devastating mind malfunctions as Alzheimer's disease, depression, drug addiction, schizophrenia and traumatic brain damage -- research projects have multiplied dramatically."

And that's why, 30 years later, nobody suffers any more from Alzheimer's disease, depression, drug addiction, schizophrenia and traumatic brain damage. Thanks to dramatically multiplied research projects!

Well, that was interesting.

Amazon will tell you:

Named One of the 10 Best Books of 2023 by The Washington Post and Publishers Weekly • One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2023• A National Bestseller • A New York Times Editor's Choice pick • Nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Fiction, I suppose, although it's about real people. John von Neumann, mostly. The book's author, Benjamín Labatut, tells that part, chapter by chapter, in the words of von Neuemann's family, colleagues, and friends. And also enemies. Each in his or her own style. (But mostly, not all, in long multiple-page paragraphs, which can get a little tiring.) It works out to be a biography, sort of.

I read a more conventional bio back in 2023, and one common theme between this book and that one is that genius can be accompanied by mental misery. (That bio discussed Gödel, Turing, Wolfram, George R. Price. This one throws in Paul Ehrenfest, who committed suicide after murdering his own son. Yeesh.

One "contributor" is Richard Feynman, who worked with von Newmann on the Manhattan Project. I've read quite a bit about Feynman, and (it seems to me) that Labatut rendered his part pretty well.

But as far as I could tell, each contributor was an actual person. Even Nils Aal Barricelli; as I was reading his chapter, I said, "This guy has to be made up." Nope. He's real, and he's in Wikipedia! So there.

But when von Neumann dies, the book's not over! The final hundred pages or so is relatively straight reportage about the game of Go, its human masters, and Google's effort to develop a Go-playing AI to beat the humans. (Chess is trivial in comparison.) It concentrates on the showdown between Lee Sedol, probably the greatest (human) Go player ever, and Google's "AlphaGo", which beat him badly back in 2016. Also interesting.