Opposing views on ruling in the Underworld

As I may have mentioned, I am currently re-reading The Odyssey - one of the pillars on which Western literature is built. In Book 11, Odysseus (our hero) makes a trip to Hades, at the direction of the witch Circe, to get directions to help him return home to Ithaca. He can only get these directions from some dead seer. Circe instructs him on how to manage the dead, and it involves slaying an animal and allowing its blood to drain into a trench. The dead can then drink from this trench and communicate with Odysseus.

He talks to the seer and gets his directions but then he wants to catch up with some of his old comrades from the Trojan War, who have since passed. He catches up with Agamemnon who was ambushed and slain by his wife and her lover upon his return to Greece. He also sees Achilles, the great hero of The Iliad who killed Hector. Early on in the Iliad, Achilles was famously offered the choice between a long and forgotten existence and a much shorter heroic one, after which his name would be remembered forever. It's obvious which path he chose.

When he sees Achilles, Odysseus suggests, "I see, you lord it over the dead in all your power. So grieve no more at dying, great Achilles."

To which, Achilles responds, "No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus! By god, I'd rather slave on earth for another man - some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive - than rule down here over all the breathless dead."

Contrast that to Milton's famous quote from Lucifer in Paradise Lost: "Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven."

I prefer Achilles zest for life, but what do you expect out of the Devil?

How Babe Ruth's Rise Mirrored a Change in American Culture

I am currently reading a recently published book highlighting Mickey Mantle's 1956 season - the first in which he won the MVP (Mantle would win two more, including 1957). The book is entitled A Season in the Sun, the Rise of Mickey Mantle. It's fairly interesting, but people have cited some inaccuracies as troublesome. The one thing I noticed is that the authors (who I believe have history background moreso than sports) refer to runs batted in as RBIs, when I believe is technically supposed to be expressed as "RBI" - as runs in the plural, not "in."

Anyhow, I found an interesting description in the book that applies not to Mantle, but to one of his Yankee-great predecessors: Babe Ruth. This apparently comes from an article entitled "The Babe on Balance," which appeared in a 1975 issue of the journal American Scholar. Here's the quote as it appears in the Mantle book (the bolding is mine):

"He challenged Ty Cobb's small-ball notions of scientific baseball, a strategy that emphasized getting on base, sacrificing the runner to second, executing hit-and-run plays, and protecting a one- or two-run lead. But his impact transcended the sport. Ruth's approach dovetailed with the instant gratification peddled by the nascent advertising industry. Swing for the fences, buy now and pay later, the world is at your fingertips - it all became part of the same consumer-driven culture. In Yankee pinstripes he was more than a baseball player; he was a prophet whose mighty swings made spectators gasp in wonder at the potentialities of man. He was the Great Gatsby of baseball. It seemed as if nothing was beyond his reach."

I think that does a great job of summing up the evolution of America to a consumer-driven society, which started in the 1920s and continues to this day, at least the way I have learned it.

Trash Talk from the Odyssey

This type of stuff apparently dates back all the way to the 8th Century B.C.

“Oh I knew it!”  

Broadsea broke in, mocking him (Odysseus) to his face.

“I never took you for someone skilled in games,

the kind that real men play throughout the world.

Not a chance. You’re some skipper of profiteers,

roving the the high seas in his scudding craft,

reckoning up his freight with a keen eye out

for home-cargo, grabbling the gold he can!

You’re not athlete. I see that.”

The Odyssey by Homer

Chapter 8, verses 183-89

Translated by Robert Fagles

Odysseus, of course, foils this upstart by heaving a discus apparently over everyone's heads (as they cringe) and he receives a nice jewel studded sword as reparation, but still....

According to AI, We are Doomed to Mass Extinction

Is all human intelligence just pattern recognition and should it be telling us that we are doomed to mass extinction?

As part of my job, I study trends in the artificial intelligence industry. I have done briefings discussing AI and how it works. From what I can I tell, it is based primarily on nothing more than advanced pattern recognition. If given enough examples and truth sets, AI-driven computers ( the machines in machine learning) are able to determine patterns, and then when they are given new stuff, they are able to match it with  these patterns, and we are calling that learning.

So, is that all that people do to? Do we make judgments based on patterns that we think we recognize? Isn’t that how one predicts the outcome of a future event?

I have also read a few writings on the idea of mass extinctions. Related to pattern recognition, one of the points of studying history seems to be to try and prevent the mistakes of/learn from the past.

There was an article in The Atlantic recently that discussed different theories for the extinction of the dinosaurs. The specifics are not really important, aside from that the bottom line is climate change - and climate change is also possibly responsible for all the other mass extinctions the earth has gone through, and we are possibly going through another climate change that could lead to the next mass extinction which would take out humans.

The ironic part to me is that we think we have the power to stop this climate change. But, shouldn't our intelligence tell us that this is not the case?

Let’s go back and say there have been like five mass extinctions so far. And each one  was caused by a change in climate/atmospheric conditions. What makes us think we can halt the sixth one? The popular reasoning is that we are to blame for the changing climate this time around, so we should be able to make a decision and act to stop it. That’s nice, but who or what is to blame for the five previous mass extinctions? In the case of the dinosaurs, we like to blame an asteroid (The Atlantic piece puts forward a volcano theory, but either way). Could that have been stopped? Probably not by the dinosaurs.

From my view, it seems that these mass extinctions are merely a result of evolution, and we (humans) are just part of all that takes place in these giant patterns that include mass extinctions. Can we help ourselves from ruining the environment? The answer would seem to be “no,” that we are just a vehicle, like an asteroid (or volcanic) eruption that is the agent for this change.

That said, if you believe in the "divine spark" and that some divine power indeed makes humans different than all else in creation, it's possibly to argue that things could turn out differently. I am not saying that this type of belief is wrong, it just doesn't seem to fit in with logic-based scientific models.

So, where does that leave us? There is always hope that the God-based, divine spark model is true, so we should continue to work to reverse/slow the pace of climate change. But, based on our intellect, we also shouldn't be surprised if we fail. On a positive note, if you apply technology adoption curves I typically see in the market to climate change, it will take a lot longer for it to really gain steam that we are initially anticipating. Of course, once it does...is it possible to prepare for a mass extinction?