great name for a magazine

(source)

Ted Turner

from a Playboy interview with Ted Turner, which I find here.

PLAYBOY: You go to every home game and sit in the front row. Why don’t you sit in the upper deck in the owner’s air-conditioned box?
TURNER: That’s what’s wrong! I told you, you idiot! All the owners sit up there behind their bulletproof glass and they’re afraid to meet the fans. I sit down front and I have to give about three dozen autographs during every game. Anyway, I figure the best seats are in the front row. The first thing I did was spend $1,000,000 on a giant TV screen over the scoreboard, then I spent $500,000 moving the dugouts and front rows closer. What I really love is catching foul balls and throwing them back in. Caught one the first day after I got back from winning the America’s Cup. Not too shabby!

PLAYBOY: We notice that some of the Braves grew mustaches and beards. You have no objection to that?
TURNER: Hell, you’ve got a beard and I’ve got a mustache. I don’t care what a ballplayer does, if it makes him happy, it makes me happy. Just as long as he wears something over his cock, you know.

More:

PLAYBOY: Considering the fact that you got interested in baseball just two years ago, how can you stand to be around it so much?
TURNER: It’s like anything, my friend; no matter what you’re doing, if your attitude’s right, you’re going to enjoy it. I mean, when I was in the Coast Guard cleaning latrines, I whistled while I was cleaning them. I didn’t even question it. “Mine is not to question why, mine is but to do or die.”
PLAYBOY: Do you think about your past a lot?
TURNER: Yeah, I always wonder why people did things. When you think back, when men look back, the happiest times of their lives were when they got together and did something. We are social animals. The most fun that you ever have as a man is in doing men’s things. Men’s things are primarily getting a bunch of guys together and going out and conquering a country, fighting a war, winning a big fight, putting a baseball team together. For most guys, the happiest times were when they were on the football team, when they won the Ivy League championship or the state championship or the debate team or the bridge team or whatever it was. But first of all, you got to get a good bunch of guys together and do it, whatever it is. And then you have to get them all excited and motivated so they’ll bust their ass. People have the most fun when they’re busting their ass.

More:

PLAYBOY: You still love history?
TURNER: Yeah, mostly military history. As much as I hate war now, I was basically a warrior. I was reading about war all the time as a kid. Fighting and soldiers and all that stuff. What I wanted to be was Horatio, Admiral Nelson, Napoleon, Alexander the Great and Pericles; they were the greatest warriors.
PLAYBOY: Why did you like it so much?
TURNER: In the past, war was a lot of fun. You know, rape and plunder, kill and steal. There weren’t enough women to go around, because they died early, so you grabbed the other guy’s women, sold his children into slavery and killed the soldiers. Used to go home and have a big parade. Glorious, you know. Now war is finished.
PLAYBOY: What do you mean?
TURNER: It’s no longer fun. The weapons are too sophisticated. It’s not men leading the fleet into battle or running up the flags, you know. Back in the old days, when they didn’t have professional sporting events, war was sport, like gladiators killing each other. You know who was the original rookie of the year? David, when he went out against Goliath.

(Similar thought from Bruce Catton). More:

PLAYBOY: How much money do you need to stay happy?
TURNER: Not much. Just give me an old 12-meter sailboat and a couple of movie starlets, a house in the suburbs and a television station and I can get by on one sirloin strip at a time, or a two-and-a-quarter-pound lobster, plus a couple hundred thou in the bank.
PLAYBOY: Sounds like wealth is the way to joy, then.
TURNER: I’ve seen very, very poor people who were happy and very, very wealthy people who were miserable. I mean, you have to realize how lucky you are that you weren’t born a mosquito. Not to mention people–a black guy wonders, Why wasn’t I born white? Or a guy from India says, Why wasn’t I born an American? But you’re still better off than a mosquito, ’cause it lives only one summer and gets swatted at every time it gets a bite to eat.
PLAYBOY: You turn out to be quite a philosopher.
TURNER: Well, at least I know the meaning of life.
PLAYBOY: We’re waiting.
TURNER: Man is put on earth for one reason alone, and that’s to reproduce. As soon as we do, we start dying. Life is one great big endless circle. You know that song, “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here”? Who was the wisest man ever? Socrates, right? He said, “All I know is that I know nothing.” Which is pretty heavy. It’s a shattering thought.

Without Ted Turner there’d be no Cartoon Network, no Adult Swim, no Common Side Effects? An effect Ted Turner had on my life: because the residue of his cable empire is still HQ’d there, we’ve made several visits to Atlanta. It coulda been Dallas or Phoenix or something. The rise of Ted Turner, is it connected to the overall rise of Georgia that came with the Jimmy Carter governorship? The two were friends:

“I was a regular fishing companion with Ted, and he and I were both fishing for bass, and he had told me that he had just heard that Jane Fonda was going to get a divorce from her husband. And he was thinking about asking her for a date,” friend and former President Jimmy Carter told CNN in a previous interview.

(sources, I can’t find the original CNN interview transcribed.)

dairy farming

The number of dairy farms in the United States had fallen to fewer than 25,000 from a peak of nearly 700,000 in the 1970s. Milk prices had barely risen in half a century, held down by overproduction and a handful of large corporations that dominated the dairy market. The costs of running a family farm had skyrocketed by as much as 500 percent.

wild stat from this NYT piece.

Nut picking

“I Love Lucy” wasn’t important content, but it was shared content. And it meant that tomorrow morning you had a whole bunch of topics you could go to with your neighbor or your co-worker that was just shared cultural data.

We don’t have any of that anymore. So, in a world where everybody is incentivized to go narrow but deep, there’s not a lot of need to call out B.S. and crazy on your own end of the continuum.

There’s a ton of incentive for both political addicts on the right to find some nut job on the left who did or said something crazy — “They’re all going to grab our guns” — or there’s some nut job on the left who says everybody on the right wants to do this horrible thing to you because they found some idiot on Twitter or on a podcast who said that thing.

The problem with that kind of nut picking is it doesn’t ever solve a problem.

I found Ben Sasse’s term a useful description of something I see constantly (especially on X).

Tracy Kidder

I see that Tracy Kidder has died. Several of his books made an impression on me. Here’s a page from his war memoir, My Detachment, which I enjoyed:

How about this:

How does that interview work? “Hey um couple questions in case you die.”

“well he would say that, wouldn’t he”

I misremembered the famous phrase of Mandy Rice-Davies.

The UK is so odd:

In 1980, with Shirley Flack, Rice-Davies wrote her autobiography, Mandy…Subsequently, journalist Libby Purves, who had met Rice-Davies when Mandy was published, invited her to join a female re-creation on the River Thames of Jerome K. Jerome’s comic novel Three Men in a Boat.

This expedition was commissioned by Alan Coren for the magazine Punch, the other members of the party being cartoonist Merrily Harpur and a toy Alsatian to represent Montmorency, the dog in the original story. Purves recounted how she “immediately spotted that this Rice-Davies was a woman to go up the Amazon with” and, among other things, that “only Mandy’s foxy charm saved us from being evicted from a lock for being drunk on pink Champagne.”

Nothing new

The idea that AI is gonna give us all too much free time doesn’t worry me. From McCullough’s Truman:

Machine Learning Learning

A sense that the frontier is moving very very fast on what we crudely call “AI.” (A rare point of agreement with President Trump*. “artificial intelligence” is a bad name, I don’t like using it and look for alternatives.)

It reminds us of the explosive growth of Internet, it moved fast. Many of the fast movers thrived. I started college in 1999. That was the first time I had consistent Internet access that didn’t rely on a school lab or an AOL free trial with a 3.5 disk mailed to us. Some of the first bloggers – Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesisas – established themselves and stayed there. A sense of if you’re not keeping up you’re falling behind motivated me.

Maybe we should “run at it” as Bill Gurley advises. This stuff isn’t going away, we can mock it, complain about it, or try to figure out what it can do.

The only coding I’ve ever done was in BASIC, or making a text football game on my TI-83 during Statistics class. That was quite satisfying, but limited. During the pandemic, I asked a friend who’s sharp at coding – we’ll call him CC, Coding Chum – what “learn to code” would look like. He suggested we work on a specific project. I suggested a name generator that would scrape Wikipedia, gather real names, and randomly pair first and last names. CC gave me a series of Zoom tutorials where we worked on this in Python. My takeaway was that “learning to code” for me would take several years and I’d never be professional grade at it. I lacked the aptitude and motivation.

Along comes “vibe coding.” This is where you type, in words, what you want to happen, and a machine intelligence does the coding for you. I decided to try this using Claude Code.

The main points of friction for me were interacting with the Terminal on my Mac. I don’t even know how to enter command lines or anything on my computer. But Claude (regular, I’m paying for the $20 a month level) walked me through that, often with me sending it screenshots of error messages.

Once we got through that, and installed what I needed for Claude Code, we got to work. The Wikipedia project proved too daunting for Claude Code. So, we reduced the scale. What’s a pool of names?

How about everyone who ever played Major League Baseball? Famously one of the most recorded and compiled activities, surely there would be databases. I didn’t even tell Claude Code what databases to use, but it went to work, gathered the names of all the twenty something thousand people who ever played Major League Baseball and create a name generator that would pair random first and last names.

This took some coaching and debugging that took less than an hour. Here’s the result. It favors unique first names: common names like “Mike” are in there only once, so they come up the same number of times as say Kenshin or Alvis. But, it works. All told this took less than an hour.

The result I shared with CC, who within a few minutes created a revised version, you can select for 1920s names, limit by eras, etc. People who are good at coding will still be better at coding.

Yet for me, a person not good at coding, I could now do in minutes what once seemed like it would take a year’s worth of training and then much hacking away to accomplish.

The limits of Machine Learning are still funny. That was me asking Claude to find obscure works of microhistory published by academic presses. Despite me sending it up here, it did a pretty good job.

As Ben Affleck points out, as a writer it will generate at best average material, and average writing is, as writing, worthless. But that’s now. Who knows what’s coming? As information gatherer, as a research assistant, Machine Learning tools are already tremendous.

When I finished my vibe coding an excitement was paired with a small sadness. The only limit to what I could accomplish is my imagination. And… I couldn’t really think of much else.

Someone on X suggested a powerful use is data visualization. I went to work. Here’s an example:

I asked Claude to go through Census data and create a chart of US horse and mule populations. I asked it to cite sources in MLA format:

Here’s another:

This chart doesn’t show us much that’s new, such a chart may have even existed. These just happened to be some personal botherations I looked into. Work that would’ve taken an afternoon is done in seconds.

Extrapolate from here: what happens when we start putting this on archives, untranslated literatures? Historians have made careers on stuff like, for example, showing correlations between Salem land ownership and witchcraft allegations. If you start putting machines on archives, what connections will it find?

The hard part might be getting physical documents into the machines (which was a challenge for the witchcraft guys):

Published in 1978 in three volumes, The Salem Witchcraft Papers: Verbatim Transcripts of the Legal Documents of the Salem Witchcraft Outbreak of 1692 included transcriptions of the legal papers that had been done by a WPA team headed by Archie N. Frost in 1938, which had only been available to scholars in typescript form on deposit with the Essex Institute and with the Essex County Clerk of the Courts.

My belief is that the humanities will be slow to realize the effects these tools could have on their disciplines. By tomorrow you could have a silicon-based assistant who’s read everything extant in Latin and Greek. Or the entirety of the California Digital Newspaper Collection, or the Texas Slavery Project, or the Congressional Record. Here on my desk is a copy of Heart Of Europe: A History Of The Holy Roman Empire. Every paragraph seems to have something like “The Prussian King held only 4.5 percent of the agricultural land, with nobles owning and directly managing 11 per cent, and cities and foundations a further 4.5 percent.” Crunching that data might’ve been some historian’s summer. What kind of analysis will your computer assistant be able to do?

This assistant can read every language and find any pattern, and be trained to look for anything.

The job may scale up from doing the work to managing and steering the incredible power of the automated work-doers. We’ll all become managers. We’ll still have to figure out what to ask, of course.

It’s funny, I’m reminded of Shelby Foote:

I’ve never had anything resembling a secretary or a research assistant. I don’t want those. Each time I type, it gives me another shot at it, another look at it. As for research, I can’t begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else. A research assistant couldn’t have done that. Not being a trained historian, I had botherations that led to good things. For instance, I didn’t take careful notes while reading. Then I’d get to something and I’d say, By golly, there’s something John Rawlins said at that time that’s real important. Where did I see it? Then I would remember that it was in a book with a red cover, close to the middle of the book, on the right-hand side and one third from the top of the page. So I’d spend an hour combing through all my red-bound books. I’d find it eventually, but I’d also find a great many other things in the course of the search.

There’s a lot to that. On the other hand, I remembered something like that quote, but I couldn’t remember where I found it. I thought maybe Shelby Foote? I told my troubles to two machine learned machines. Perplexity AI was stumped but Claude found it in seconds.

The future is hard to predict but we’re sitting on a volcano.

* still feels insane to type those words

Five o’clock somewhere, Truman era edition

An Alphabetical Index to Helytimes

Using Perplexity AI as a personal tutor in Python, we created an index, alphabetical by title of all ~ 1887 posts on this website. It was the first programming I’ve done since writing a text football game in my TI-83. The result is not a perfect organizational tool, but not nothing either. The Internet erodes like the cliffs at Monument Valley, many of these posts are full of dead media or missing links. Nevertheless this seems like a helpful resource (mostly to me, the most likely to use it).